Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s

DOI: 10.1057/9781137562500.0001
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DOI: 10.1057/9781137562500.0001
 Dark Humor in
Films of the 1960s
Wheeler Winston Dixon
University of Nebraska, Lincoln, USA

DOI: 10.1057/9781137562500.0001
dark humor in films of the 1960s
Copyright © Wheeler Winston Dixon, 2015.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-56420-7
All rights reserved.
First published in 2015 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.

ISBN:978-1-137-56250-0 PDF
ISBN:978-1-349-85032-7
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from
the Library of Congress.
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
First edition: 2015
www.palgrave.com/pivot
DOI: 10.1057/9781137562500
 For Gwendolyn

DOI: 10.1057/9781137562500.0001
 Contents
Acknowledgments vii
About the Author viii
1 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s 1
2 A Cinema of Violence: The Films of
D. Ross Lederman 32
3 Juan Orol, Phantom of the Mexican Cinema 64
4 Missing in Action: The Lost Version of
Vanishing Point 72
5 The Invisible Cinema of Marcel Hanoun 79
6 The Noir Vision of Max Ophüls, Romantic
Fatalist 88
Works Cited 94
Index 99

vi DOI: 10.1057/9781137562500.0001
 Acknowledgments
Most of the materials in this volume originally appeared
in abbreviated versions in the online edition of Film
International, Daniel Lindvall, editor and publisher, and
are reproduced here by gracious permission; the essay
on the films of D. Ross Lederman originally appeared in
a severely edited form in the journal Film Criticism – my
thanks to Lloyd Michaels, editor and publisher, for
permission to republish. All the materials in this volume
have been considerably expanded, updated, and revised
for publication here, and thus appear in their complete
versions in this text for the first time. As always, I wish to
thank Richard Graham, Love Library, at the University of
Nebraska, Lincoln, for his unstinting research help in all
my recent work.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137562500.0002 vii

 About the Author
Wheeler Winston Dixon is the James Ryan Professor of
Film Studies, Coordinator of the Film Studies Program,
and Professor of English at the University of Nebraska,
Lincoln. With Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, he is the editor
of Quick Takes: Movies and Popular Culture, a new series of
books from Rutgers University Press. His latest books as an
author include Streaming: Movies, Media and Instant Access
(2013); Death of the Moguls: The End of Classical Hollywood
(2012); 21st Century Hollywood: Movies in the Era of
Transformation (2011, coauthored with Gwendolyn Audrey
Foster); A History of Horror (2010); and Film Noir and the
Cinema of Paranoia (2009). Dixon’s book A Short History of
Film (2008, coauthored with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster)
was reprinted six times through 2012. A second, revised
edition was published in 2013; the book is a required text
in universities throughout the world. As a filmmaker, his
complete works are archived in the permanent collection
of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

viii DOI: 10.1057/9781137562500.0003

 1
Dark Humor in Films
of the 1960s
Abstract: In the 1960s, themes which had previously been
dealt with only in the most serious fashion were suddenly
subject to burlesque, or parody, as filmmakers and
audiences sought to move beyond the strained seriousness
that characterized many of the most respected problem
films of the 1960s. In such films as Roger Corman’s The
Little Shop of Horrors (1960) and A Bucket of Blood
(1959), Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I
Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964),
Theodore J. Flicker’s The President’s Analyst (1967), and
many others, viewers embraced a new vision of the world
unfettered by the constraints of prior censorship.

Dixon, Wheeler Winston. Dark Humor in Films of the

1960s. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
doi: 10.1057/9781137562500.0004.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137562500.0004 
 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s

In the 1960s, themes which had previously been dealt with only in the
most serious fashion were suddenly subject to burlesque, or parody, as
filmmakers and audiences sought to move beyond the strained serious-
ness that characterized many of the most respected problem films of the
1960s. In such films as Roger Corman’s The Little Shop of Horrors (1960)
and A Bucket of Blood (1959), Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I
Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1963), Theodore J. Flicker’s
The President’s Analyst (1967), Stanley Kramer’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad,
Mad World (1963), William Castle’s The Old Dark House (1963), George
Axelrod’s Lord Love a Duck (1966), Mel Brooks’ The Producers (1968),
Tony Richardson’s The Loved One (1965), Roy Boulting’s I’m All Right,
Jack (1959), Stanley Donen’s Bedazzled (1967), Michael Winner’s I’ll Never
Forget What’s ’is Name (1967), Karel Reisz’s Morgan! A Suitable Case for
Treatment (1966), Robert Downey’s Putney Swope (1969), to say nothing
of Richard Lester’s The Knack . . . and How to Get It (1965), as well as Kevin
Billington’s acidic political comedy The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer
(1970), viewers embraced a new vision of the world unfettered by the
constraints of prior censorship, and wedded to a sense of the absurdity
of life, in which all previous values were suddenly called into question,
and found either morally or socially bankrupt. These films, which treated
such subjects such as war, sex, death, the workplace, national politics,
and the family with studied irreverence, found both a willing audience
and a place in the emerging national consciousness of the post-JFK
assassination era.
Indeed, “sick” or what was known then as “black humor” was very
much part of mainstream popular culture during this era. As one oft-told
anecdote of the period recounted, “there’s a story about an adolescent
boy who was taken to a psychiatrist. The doctor drew a rectangle on a
sheet of paper and showed it to the boy. ‘What does it make you think
of?’ he asked. The boy looked at it and said, ‘Sex.’ The doctor got the
same response when he drew a circle on the paper. When he had drawn
a triangle and an octagon and an ellipse with the same results, he said,
‘Son, you need help.’ The boy was amazed. ‘But, doc,’ he protested, ‘you’re
the one that’s drawing the dirty pictures!’ ” (Zern, 1958: n.pag.). Jules
Feiffer’s groundbreaking collection of multipanel cartoons, Sick, Sick,
Sick, published in 1958, was also a harbinger of things to come, and along
with the stand-up comedy of Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, and others, paved
the way for the “sick” humor movement that in many ways dominated
the 1960s cinematic comedy.

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 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s 

Predictably, “sick” humor was embraced most enthusiastically by

those on the margins of society; Feiffer’s cartoons were almost imme-
diately picked up by the then cutting-edge New York newspaper, The
Village Voice, as a weekly feature, and in Los Angeles, maverick film-
maker Roger Corman soon added his own twist to the nascent genre.
Working with screenwriter Charles B. Griffith, Corman, then an outlaw
visionary making five-day films on budgets as low as $40,000, shot the
groundbreaking dark comedy A Bucket of Blood in 1959. The connection
with Feiffer’s humor was stressed even in the poster for the film, which
promised potential viewers that they would be “sick, sick, sick from
laughing!” while seeing the film.
The film, which runs a scant 66 minutes and was shot for $50,000
in five days on hastily prelit sets, which seem ready to collapse at any
moment, chronicles the “artistic career” of hapless busboy Walter Paisley
(Rick Miller), who is the lowest man on the social totem pole at the Yellow
Door, a beatnik café run by the imperious Leonard (Anthony Carbone).
His only friend is the platonically sympathetic Carla (Barboura Morris),
who tells Walter that he needs to learn to express himself. But the real
force behind the Yellow Door is freeform poet Maxwell H. Brock (Julian
Burton), who declaims aimless, Allen Ginsbergesque improvised verses,
while a sax wails mournfully in the background. The arbiter of taste for
the Yellow Door crowd, Maxwell thinks little of Walter, until Walter
appears at the café one day with a “sculpture” in tow, entitled “Dead Cat.”
Actually, the “sculpture” really is Walter’s dead cat, which had somehow
become stuck in the walls of Walter’s beatnik pad. Trying to extricate the
poor animal, Walter instead accidentally stabs it with a knife, and then,
recalling the exhortations of Maxwell Brock to “create, create!,” covers it
in quick-drying clay. Predictably, the “Dead Cat” sculpture is a sensation
at the Yellow Door, and Walter is “discovered” as an artistic genius by the
hyperbolic Maxwell.
The next night, leaving the club, Walter is followed home by under-
cover policeman Lou Raby (Bert Convy), who has been casing the
Yellow Door as a possible narcotics distribution center. One of Walter’s
admirers has given Walter a small vial of heroin as a gift; Raby searches
Walter, and finds the illicit substance. The naive Walter has no idea
what heroin is, and is completely innocent, but that doesn’t stop Raby,
who tries to arrest Walter. In the ensuing struggle, Walter hits Raby
over the head with a frying pan, killing him, then covers Raby’s body
in plaster, and displays the finished sculpture as “Murdered Man.” The

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 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s

acclaim is instantaneous; Walter is a star. Now on a roll, and intoxicated

by his newfound fame, Walter deliberately (for the first time) strangles
an artist’s model and displays her dead body as yet another art work;
this is followed by the decapitated head of a mill worker, whom Walter
has also deliberately killed. At length, Walter’s “artistry” is exposed, and
the admiring crowd at the Yellow Door turns into an angry mob, out
for Walter’s blood. With no way out, Walter runs to his apartment and
hangs himself, just as the mob breaks down his door. For Corman, the
film was an experiment. As he noted,
I wanted to see if we could do some comedy-horror for a low budget. This
film and The Little Shop of Horrors were made partially to make money but
partially just to have fun. Bucket of Blood was made to see if I could shoot a
film in just five days. My previous record was six. Little Shop of Horrors was
made to see if I could break Bucket of Blood’s record and shoot a film in two
days. Little Shop actually took two days and one night. The nicest thing about
this movie is that the hero is also the supposed villain. He’s been referred to
as a schlemiel by some people. Certainly, in one sense, he’s a weakling. Yet,
in another sense, he’s more powerful than the law. I don’t like to work with
traditional heroes in my films. I think I deliberately try to place emphasis
on the characters who are not totally heroic. What it boils down to is this: if
you’ve gone through school and you’ve watched the halfback get the girls all
your life, when you get the chance to make a film that calls for the halfback
to get the girl, you can dull his luster by making the other characters around
him a lot more interesting. (Naha, 1982: 138)

Variety, the then-powerful show business trade paper, was less than
impressed, commenting that:
The film is a 66-minute joke compounded of beatniks and gore. During the
first half of the picture there are many opportunities for gruesome humor,
of which writer Charles B. Griffith takes full advantage. In the latter half,
the humor becomes lost as the filmmakers concentrate more on the horror
and as it becomes necessary to punish the lovable maniac for his crimes.
Corman has expertly captured the espresso house atmosphere and peopled
it with accurate characters whose real-life counterparts should wince.
(Naha, 1982: 138)

Screenwriter Charles B. Griffith has his own memories of the produc-

tion, noting that in the scenario for A Bucket of Blood, Corman and
Griffith (who had worked together on many screenplays before, all of
them straightforward genre films) found a new format to work with.
As Griffith later noted, “that’s the most precious thing you can find . . . a

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 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s 

new structure” (Graham, 2005). Working together, the two men kicked
around a number of ideas, including a script in which the “hero” would
be a chef who cooks his customers, and then serves their barbecued
corpses to his other patrons, without their knowledge. This idea was too
“sick” for the Motion Picture Production Code, however, so they reluc-
tantly abandoned the project. Then Griffith had an inspiration, which
would lead to Audrey, the giant, insatiable carnivorous plant at the center
of Little Shop of Horrors. “How about a man-eating plant?” Griffith asked,
to which Corman noncommittally replied, “Okay,” and Little Shop was off
and running (Graham, 2005).
The film’s plot is simple, yet effective. Seymour Krelboyne (Jonathan
Haze) works in Gravis Mushnik’s (Mel Welles) flower shop where he is
every bit as exploited by his boss as Walter Paisley was in Bucket of Blood.
Seymour’s life seems hopeless, except for the love of his girlfriend Audrey
(Jackie Joseph). Devoted to his beloved plants, Seymour is distressed
when he finds one particularly exotic bloom dying, failing to respond to
any restorative measures. But when Seymour accidentally cuts his finger
while feeding “Audrey, Jr.” (a name he has given the plant to honor his
girlfriend, Audrey), the plant laps it up, and in a nasal, Bronx-accented
voice, pleads for more. Unwilling to use more of his own blood to supply
food for the rapidly growing plant, Seymour starts scouring the streets
at night for transients, killing them and then dragging them back to the
flower shop, where Audrey, Jr., devours them whole. By now, Audrey,
Jr., has become a celebrity, but the police are suspicious of Seymour,
and charge him with murder. In desperation, Seymour offers himself to
Audrey, Jr., as a last human sacrifice, which is eagerly consumed by the
ravenous plant. As the shocked onlookers watch in horror, Audrey, Jr.,
suddenly bursts into full bloom; on each of the flower petals are the faces
of Audrey, Jr.’s (and Seymour’s) victims, including, of course, Seymour
himself. As Corman himself noted,
This whole movie was a joke. I was trying to break a record for making a
movie. One of the fellows at the studio showed me a storefront set that wasn’t
in use and asked me if I wanted it. I said that I didn’t have a project at the time
but if he could leave the set standing for a week or two, I was sure that I could
come up with something. He didn’t think I could. I told him that not only
could I come up with a movie in that period of time, but that I could shoot it
in two days! He dared me. So, I called up Chuck Griffith who had written A
Bucket of Blood. We had a lot of fun shooting that film and we managed to do
it in only five days. I figured if anyone could come up with something zany

DOI: 10.1057/9781137562500.0004
 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s

for a two-day schedule, Chuck could. We brainstormed for a night. He wrote

the script in a week and we shot the movie in two days and one night, on the
store set, which became our florist shop. (Naha, 1982: 142)

Corman used two Mitchell BNC cameras simultaneously to record the

action, shooting roughly 50 pages a day for two days—an amazing rate
of speed—and then one night of “pick ups” to complete the film, mostly
the exterior scenes in which Seymour searches for new victims for his
beloved plant (Graham, 2005). But, according to Jackie Joseph, who
played Seymour’s girlfriend Audrey in the film, there was another reason
for the speed with which the film was shot. As she put it,
The [real] reason Little Shop had to wrap by midnight of New Year’s Eve, 1959,
was that, contractually, starting in 1960, the concept of residuals would come
into play. Roger, being an exquisite businessman, certainly didn’t want to pay
anybody [residuals] if it wasn’t really necessary! It was a question of beating
the deadline before the new residual rule, and so it had to finish in two days.
(Weaver)

Making all of this more ironic, Little Shop ultimately wound up in the
Public Domain through careless record keeping, something that Corman
abhorred, and when the Frank Oz musical remake came out in 1986, he
profited little from the venture. The film also features an early perform-
ance by Jack Nicholson as Wilbur Force, a masochistic dental patient,
who through a plot contrivance, mistakes Seymour for a dentist (actu-
ally, Seymour has just killed the dentist, albeit accidentally, and plans
to feed him to Audrey, Jr.). “No Novocain, please . . . it dulls the senses”
begs Nicholson, as the utterly inept Seymour proceeds to grind Wilbur’s
teeth to dust. Certainly, Little Shop was pushing the limits of conventional
comedy, but it’s the sheer manic energy and intentionally abrasive humor
of the film that ensured its status as a “sick” humor classic. As for the big-
budget musical remake, Corman had quite definite opinions, noting that
[the] $25 million picture . . . is history, and is never referred to. My two-day
picture, which was made maybe 35 years ago, is still playing. And I think one
of the reasons is the [1986] picture was obviously a bigger, better-looking
picture, but it didn’t have the youthful verve and excitement of the original,
and frankly, it wasn’t as funny. (Simpson, 1995)

Both of these projects were low budget, groundbreaking, and entirely out
of the cinematic and dominant cultural mainstream, which is, of course,
exactly what Corman and Griffith were looking for: “a new structure,”
as Griffith put it. They had created, out of desperation, alienation, and

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 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s 

their outsider status, a film that challenged late 1950s comedy movies.
As Nancy Pogel and William Chamberlain note of dark comedy (first
known as “black” comedy), the genre operates using an entirely different
set of rules from more conventional, mainstream humor. As they argue,
black comedy involves an ultimate and finally frightening or horrifying
subversion of all logical structures [my emphasis], even the medium through
which the comedy itself is conveyed. Black comedy, at its best, permits the
audience not a single refuge or crutch . . . true black comedy permits no safe
island from which the chaotic or absurd world may be observed; not even
the art itself is left available as a refuge in which the reader may seek æsthetic
solace and “meaning.” (Pogel and Chamberlain, 1985: 187)

This is the essence of all nihilist humor, because it calls for the reevalu-
ation of all values, and questions the supposed boundaries that we set,
as a society, on humor. But in postwar America, and the world, the old
social structures were crumbling, to be replaced by an emptiness which
allowed greater transgression against perceived normative rules.
Then up-and-coming comedian Rodney Dangerfield witnessed this
firsthand when he saw comedian Lenny Bruce perform in the mid-1950s,
working with material that would have been impossible to use only a
decade earlier. Bruce’s humor was almost too far ahead of the curve, and
as Dangerfield recalled, Bruce’s “edge” was very rough indeed. The night
Dangerfield caught his act, Bruce began his set at a Greenwich Village
nightclub with these words: “Tonight, here’s how I’m going to open my
act. I’m going to pee on you. If a guy tells jokes, you’ll forget him. But
if a guy pees on you, you’ll never forget him.” An outraged audience
member shouted out “Keep it clean! Keep it clean!” And as Dangerfield
wrote in his memoirs, “Lenny answered him in these exact words: ‘Fuck
you, Jim, you square motherfucker!’ ” (Dangerfield, 2004: 159). Instantly,
Dangerfield recognized that this was the coming trend. Bruce’s retort
strikes to the heart of dark comedy. It’s about you, Jim; you are the butt of
the joke. There’s no distance, there’s no safety zone. If you don’t like it, get
out of the room. That’s your only option.
Indeed, Bruce himself had written the screenplay for, and appeared
in, a particularly sleazy film noir/sick comedy, Phil Tucker’s Dance Hall
Racket (1953), in which he played Vincent, a psychotic hit man employed
by the owner of a rundown “dime a dance” club. (One of the strippers
at the club, by the way, was his wife at the time, Honey Bruce; amaz-
ingly, Bruce’s mother, Sally Marr, also appears in the film.) The dialogue
throughout Dance Hall Racket is delivered with the twist of a well-honed

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 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s

knife, with the most dramatic turns of phrase being delivered as

throwaway gags, as in Bruce’s nonchalant delivery of the self-scripted
line, “Big deal! I killed a guy, it just makes me a criminal,” after he has
done precisely that. Cheap, rotten, and unapologetic, Dance Hall Racket
is a precursor of what was to come. An outlaw production all the way, it
was hastily shot as a Poverty Row quickie at the inaptly named Quality
Studios in Hollywood. In its brutally dark vision, and its unrelenting
gallows humor, Dance Hall Racket was the sort of project the majors
would never touch in the 1950s, but in the sharp-edged 1960s, things
would prove to be very different.
With sick comedy beginning to bubble up through the margins of
the studio system in Hollywood, filmmakers in Britain soon leaped on
the bandwagon. The country was in a “gallows humor” mood anyway.
World War II had left London a shell of its former self, as a result of the
Nazi Blitz bombing and the economics of war, and cinematic “outliers,”
such as Robert Hamer’s exquisite comedy of murder, Kind Hearts
and Coronets (1949), emerged as a new form of British humor. In this
remarkable film, a young man, unjustly deprived of his birthright by
an unfailing, uncaring British social system, contrives to murder one
by one all the potential heirs to his estate that stand before him in the
line of succession.
Dennis Price, a delightfully urbane actor, is perfection as Louis
Mazzini, the young man seeking to reclaim his title as the Duke of
Chalfont. Adding to the mordant humor is the fact that all eight of the
heirs, members of the D’Ascoyne family, are played by Alec Guinness
in a variety of disguises, including one role as a woman, Lady Agatha
D’Ascoyne. As the film proceeds with cheerfully grim efficiency, all the
D’Ascoynes succumb to Louis’s machinations, and the Dukedom is at
last his, with lands, estate, and title. Yet Louis is undone in a dénouement
of surprising absent-mindedness, no doubt as a sop to the censor.
When Hamer was assigned the task of directing the film, which was
made at Britain’s Ealing Studios, his boss, Sir Michael Balcon, sent him
a note on his first day on the set: “You are trying to sell that most unsal-
able commodity to the British—irony. Good luck to you” (Perry, 1981:
121). Of course, the film was a remarkable success, and led to a string of
similarly mordant comedies, most notably Alexander Mackendrick’s The
Ladykillers (1955), in which a group of robbers (including a young Peter
Sellers) use the cover of a genteel British boarding house to plan a large-
scale robbery, which they successfully execute, netting £60,000.

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 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s 

Their landlady, Mrs. Wilberforce (Jack Nicholson’s character’s name,

Wilbur Force, in Little Shop of Horrors, is an homage to The Ladykillers)—
played to perfection by Katie Johnson, an expert in “little old lady”
parts—discovers the plans for the robbery, and remonstrates with them
as if they were truant children. In response, the four members of the gang
resolve to murder her, but all fail at the task, and are killed themselves
in a variety of grotesque accidents. In the end, only Mrs. Wilberforce
remains alone in her house with £60,000 to her credit; although she tries
to return the money, the local police don’t believe her story, and so The
Ladykillers ends with Mrs. Wilberforce returning home, much richer,
able to retire in style.
By the late 1950s, the Boulting Brothers would produce their scath-
ing satire on labor unions, I’m All Right Jack, with Peter Sellers cast as
Communist shop steward Fred Kite. The film is rife with class-conscious
jibes and centers on the misadventures of an upper-class British “twit” (or
idiot), Stanley Windrush (Ian Carmichael), who despite family connec-
tions and the “old boy” network, as represented by his Uncle Bertram
Tracepurcel (Dennis Price) and his uncle’s Army friend Sidney De Vere
Cox (Richard Attenborough), is utterly unable to find work “befitting”
his station. He is eventually put to work in a blue-collar job at his uncle’s
guided missile factory, where he attacks his duties with vigor, arousing
the suspicions of the officious Fred Kite.
In I’m All Right Jack, everyone is seen as corrupt or incompetent, and
throwaway gags in the film (such as a “quality inspector” at a chocolate
factory sneezing into the boxes of candy she is checking) add to the film’s
overwhelmingly nihilist humor. In the end of the film, both labor and
management are shown to be interested only in their own ends, often
to absurd degrees, and when Stanley makes a televised statement expos-
ing bribery, slacking off at work, price gouging, and extortion by all the
principals involved, he is banished from “polite” society. When last seen,
Stanley is ensconced in a nudist colony, trying (literally) to escape from
all the trappings of a social order that has broken down at every level.
William Castle, better known for his “gimmick” horror films of the
late 1950s and early 1960s, such as House on Haunted Hill (1959), in which,
using a process Castle dubbed “Emergo,” “the ghost actually emerges
from the screen” (actually, an oversize skeleton briefly sweeps over the
heads of the audience), also took note of the trend toward sardonic
humor and traveled to England to collaborate with Britain’s Hammer
Studios to produce and direct The Old Dark House (1963), a dark comedy

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 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s

remake of the 1932 James Whale original of the same name. Whale’s
version was already verging toward parody, but Castle, aided and abetted
by a remarkable cast of British character actors, including Robert Morley,
Joyce Grenfell, Mervyn Johns, Peter Bull, and Fenella Fielding, top lined
by American comedian Tom Poston, takes matters several steps further
into outright “sick” farce. Based on a novel by J. B. Priestley, The Old Dark
House is a curious film in many respects. Although practically no one
remembers it, the film was the first motion picture in which the macabre
cartoonish Charles Addams took a decisive hand, designing the titles for
the film, as well as rough drafts of the interior sets (which were executed
by the gifted Bernard Robinson), and even signing his name on screen to
his credit in the film’s opening titles.
In Castle’s version of The Old Dark House, Tom Penderel (Tom Poston),
an American car salesman visiting London, delivers a car to the gloomy
country estate of his friend, Caspar Femm (Peter Bull), only to find out
that Caspar has died. With the storm raging outside, Penderel has no
choice but to spend the night in the old, dark house, where he discov-
ers to his horror that all the members of the Femm family are being
dispatched by an unknown killer, one by one, on an hourly basis. The
Femm family (the name itself is an obvious pun on “femme,” for, as it
turns out, the killer is a woman, Cecily Femm [Janette Scott], whom
no one suspects) is an exceedingly odd one, and all the actors make the
most out of the film’s numerous double entendre lines.
When Penderel is first introduced to Agatha Femm (Joyce Grenfell),
Caspar’s mother, she nods in delightful anticipation, and cheerfully
proclaims: “We’re having you for dinner . . . delicious!” before drifting out
of the room in a gleeful daze. Later, when Agatha is discovered dead with
a pair of knitting needles stuck neatly through her neck in a crosshatch
pattern, with a manic smile fixed on her face, her brother Roderick Femm
(Robert Morley) “tut tuts” disapprovingly “I don’t understand it. She was
always so careful with her knitting.” In similar fashion, the “vampish”
seducer, Morgana Femm (Fenella Fielding), repeatedly attempts to bed
the reluctant Tom throughout the film, who resists her advances because,
as he notes, people “have a way of dying” in her bedchamber.
Although Howard Thompson, writing in The New York Times, found
the film “a laboriously arch and broad blend of humor,” the film is actu-
ally one of the more successful “horror comedies,” enlivened (if that is
the right word) considerably by the energy of its cast and crew. Indeed,
the Hammer/Castle coproduction came about when Hammer and

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 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s 

William Castle each discovered that the other was in preproduction on a

remake of The Old Dark House; recognizing the opportunity afforded by
a collaboration, Hammer induced Castle to come to England and work
on their version, with his own distinctive sense of dark humor attached.
Released through Columbia, and shot in color, The Old Dark House was
originally released in black and white for economic reasons. However,
as the recent color DVD release of the film makes clear, black and white
works much better in the world of Charles Addams and J. B. Priestley,
particularly given the film’s cheerfully ghoulish sense of humor. Color
really doesn’t belong here. After all, Addams’ famous drawings, most of
which originally appeared in The New Yorker, were all done in black and
white.
Back in America, producer/director Stanley Kramer was readying a
much more ambitious project, perhaps the most overwhelmingly brutal
comedy ever made: It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963). With a cast
featuring literally every living comedian in either a leading, cameo, or
supporting role, including Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Jonathan Winters,
Mickey Rooney, Buster Keaton, Jimmy Durante, Phil Silvers, Dick
Shawn, the Three Stooges, Jerry Lewis, and everyone else in between, the
film, budgeted at a then-colossal $9.4 million, was of such epic propor-
tion that when released at 192 minutes (in two parts, with a 15-minute
intermission), after preview screenings of 210 minutes, it was one of the
most spectacular films of the year, regardless of genre.
What is most striking about the film, in the end, is not its epic dimen-
sion or scope (the film was shot in “Ultra Panavision,” then touted as the
new seamless form of Cinerama, a popular 1950s three-camera, three-
projector process that produced an illusion of depth), but rather the film’s
view of life, which is acerbic in the extreme. The premise of the film is
slim; an aging gangster, “Smiler” Grogan (Durante), runs off the highway
in his car, and with his dying words tells a group of “good Samaritans,”
who have stopped to help him, that there is $350,000 in stolen loot stashed
under a “big W” in the fictional Santa Rosita State Park in California, and
the money is theirs, if they can find it. With that, Grogan dies, literally
“kicking a bucket” down the culvert as he does so. Almost immediately,
the passersby begin fighting among themselves for the money, and soon
each one is trying to stop the others from leaving the park, and finding
the $350,000. The film then becomes a literally mind-numbing orgy of
violence and destruction, as gas stations, cars, planes, and anything else
in sight is destroyed with ritualistic, almost sadistic fetishism.

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 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s

The members of the group are shadowed in their quest by Captain

T. G. Culpepper (Spencer Tracy, in one of his last roles), the Chief of
Detectives of the Santa Rosita Police Department, but in the end, he,
too, succumbs to the temptation of “Smiler’s” loot, and tries to abscond
with the entire fortune, tricking the others into thinking he will turn
it in to his superiors at police headquarters. When the group discov-
ers they’ve been duped, they give chase, and in the end all wind up in
the hospital as a result of injuries sustained in their pursuit, including
Captain Culpepper. All their efforts have availed them nothing, and in
the bargain, all face lengthy hospital stays while they recuperate. The
film has developed a cult following over the years, and certainly, in terms
of excess, violence, and spectacle, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World is one
of the most expensive and epic “dark” comedies ever produced.
Yet the majority of humor in the film derives from outright cruelty—
Ethel Merman perpetually screaming at her onscreen husband, Milton
Berle, or anyone else in her line of fire; Phil Silvers offering a lift to the
stranded Jonathan Winters, who is puffing along in the desert on a child’s
bicycle; when Winters throws the bike away, Silvers speeds off, leaving
him in the dust; Sid Caesar and Edie Adams locked in a basement full of
exploding fireworks—and as many critics remarked at the time, the sheer
wastage of the film is appalling. As a compelling vision of the dark side of
the American dream, the film certainly succeeds. But when viewing the
film, one can’t help but wonder how much of it was conscious, and how
much simply a by-product of the movie’s brutal trajectory.
Lured on by the “promise” of instant wealth, the protagonists of
Kramer’s film are locked into a headlong race to their own destruction,
and they lay waste to everything they touch in the process. The film
remains controversial to this day for its sheer overkill; how many more car
crashes can the mind absorb? How many more shouting matches? How
much more destruction? There seems to be no answer forthcoming in
the film, which ends with Ethel Merman’s character slipping on a banana
peel in the hospital ward where all of her costars are convalescing. At
this, everyone starts laughing hysterically. Humiliation, pain, violence,
cruelty; is this really the stuff of comedy? Yet the colossal perversity of It’s
a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World remains a monument to overindulgence;
“give me more, more, more,” the film seems to say—which is just what its
protagonists want, as well.
A much lighter and more effervescent film is Richard Lester’s sex
comedy The Knack . . . and How to Get It (1965), based on the stage play

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 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s 

by Ann Jellicoe. Grade school teacher Colin (Michael Crawford) owns a

boarding house in London, and is clueless when it comes to attracting the
attention of the opposite sex. Tolen (Ray Brooks), on the contrary, lives
in the top floor of Colin’s house, and has an endless stream of women
beating down his door. When one of Colin’s other tenants moves out,
he puts up a “Room to Let” sign, hoping for a more compatible tenant.
Into this ménage comes Nancy (Rita Tushingham), a shy out-of-towner
looking for a “clean, respectable” place to stay, like the YWCA. Seeing
Colin’s sign, she decides to move in, but Tom (Donal Donnelly) has also
seen the sign, moves in unannounced, and begins to paint the entire
first floor bright white, to cover up the “brown—I hate brown” paint that
predominates the existing décor.
While Tolen is pleased to see Nancy move in, as another possible
conquest, he and Tom immediately lock horns. Tom is deeply unim-
pressed by Tolen’s sexual prowess, and sets about to undermine Tolen’s
grip on the household. Tolen would much rather have his equally
libidinous friend Rory McBride (never seen, only mentioned) as their
new flat mate, and resents Tom’s criticism of his lifestyle. To effect this,
Tolen promises Colin that he will teach him the secrets of his success
as a womanizer, but only if Rory McBride moves in and Tom moves
out. The stage is thus set for an intriguing battle of the sexes—male
and female—in which, at the end, Tolen is revealed to be a sham, Colin
and Nancy find love, and Tom feels content in keeping Rory McBride
at bay.
Lester, who had just finished directing the Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night
(1964), stages the action in The Knack in a frenzy of speeded-up motion,
jump cuts, reverse shots, superimposed titles, and fantasy sequences,
set against a backdrop of stunning art direction created by Assheton
Gorton, and further complemented by a superb jazz music track from
John Barry, then famous for scoring the James Bond films. What makes
the film “dark” is its view of relationships between men and women.
Despite the light and airy feel of the film’s construction, what serves as
the guiding narrative impulse here is The Knack’s take on heterosexual
compulsiveness—Tolen has to seduce every woman he meets; it’s almost
like an affliction. Similarly, until Tom comes on the scene, Tolen treats
Colin with only faintly disguised contempt, flaunting his success with
the ladies as proof of his heterosexualized superiority. While the film
offers a seductively inviting vision of swinging London, it also depicts
the meaningless emptiness behind Tolen’s endless succession of casual

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hookups, and views the entire romantic vision of heteronormativity with

a deeply cynical eye.
Born in Philadelphia, Lester started in commercials, but soon sensed
that America in the 1950s was no place for his glossy vision and moved
to London, where he began working in episodic television. But it was
his Monty Pythonesque short, The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film
(1960), shot in two days for a total cost of £70—with a cast including Peter
Sellers, Spike Milligan, and Leo McKern, among others—that brought
Lester to the attention of the Beatles, who summarily demanded that
he direct A Hard Day’s Night. The overwhelming success of A Hard Day’s
Night launched Lester on a long and prolific career, and The Knack, with
its crisp black-and-white cinematography by the gifted David Watkin,
as well as razor sharp editing by Antony Gibbs, is perhaps Lester’s most
assured and personal work. Indeed, this small, yet deftly observant film
went on to win the coveted Palme D’Or at the 1965 Cannes Film Festival,
much to everyone’s surprise—mainstream critics expected a more “seri-
ous” film would win the Festival’s top honor. Almost forgotten today,
The Knack nevertheless deserves another look, as a sardonic, knowing
dissertation on the sexual mores of a vanished era.
At roughly the same time that Richard Lester was working on The
Knack, another American expatriate, Stanley Kubrick, was putting the
finishing touches on one of his finest and most widely appreciated films,
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
(1963). Based on Peter George’s novel Red Alert, the film is arguably
the darkest of all political satires, and culminates in the obliteration of
the entire planet in a hail of thermonuclear bombs. At the time, with the
Soviet Union and the United States locked in an arms race stalemate,
such a prospect was hardly the stuff of comedy, but Kubrick, working
with writer Terry Southern (coauthor with Mason Hoffenberg of the
brutally satiric sex novel Candy [1958], a pop literary sensation) and
Peter George, with a hefty uncredited assistance from Peter Sellers,
fashioned a screenplay, and then a film, that fulfilled all the promise of
the project’s apocalyptic concept. At 94 minutes, the film moves swiftly,
and begins with General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden), a paranoid
anti-Communist who is clearly unhinged, ordering a nuclear attack by
his nuclear-missile-armed B-52s, convinced that the Communists are
planning to take over the United States by fluoridating the nation’s water
supply. Captain Lionel Mandrake (Peter Sellers, in one of three roles)
tries to stop him, but to no avail.

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Meanwhile, in the War Room at the Pentagon, General Buck Turgidson

(George C. Scott) apprises US president Merkin Muffley (Sellers again)
of Ripper’s unprovoked attack. After consulting with the Soviet ambas-
sador, Alexi de Sadesky (Peter Bull), Muffley calls the drunken Soviet
Premier Dimitri Kisov on the “hotline” to assure him that Ripper’s action
is that of a rogue warrior, and isn’t part of an all-out attack. However,
Kisov informs Muffley that if any nuclear attack on the Soviet Union
succeeds, even a minimal one, it will trigger a “Doomsday Machine” that
will destroy the entire planet in a barrage of thermonuclear destruction.
Muffley’s scientific advisor, Dr. Strangelove (Sellers yet again), confirms
the existence of the “Doomsday Machine,” and begins calculating how
long it will take to repopulate the Earth after such an annihilatory strike.
In the meantime, using advice from the American military, Soviet
fighters have managed to shoot down all of General Ripper’s B-52 bomb-
ers except for one, piloted by the ignorant, racist Major T. J. “King”
Kong (Slim Pickens). Although Kong’s plane is severely damaged by the
Soviets, he manages to make his way to the bomb bay, open the bomb
doors, and literally ride a huge hydrogen bomb into the sky, screaming
like a cowboy at a rodeo. In the War Room, Dr. Strangelove continues to
calculate that it would take “ten females for each male” to repopulate the
Earth in a “reasonable” amount of time, when the Doomsday Machine
suddenly activates. The film ends with a montage of nuclear bombs deto-
nating across the globe, while Vera Lynn’s British World War II hit “We’ll
Meet Again” plays on the film’s soundtrack. The film fades to black, and
the briefest of end titles.
The impact of Dr. Strangelove as both a cautionary tale and a “nightmare
comedy” (in Kubrick’s words) has not lessened with the passing of years;
indeed, it has become more pronounced. As someone who teaches Film
Studies on a regular basis to college age students, I can readily assert that
while my incoming students may not have seen Orson Welles’ Citizen
Kane (1941), Victor Fleming’s Gone with the Wind (1939), or even Michael
Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942), they have all seen at least two canonical clas-
sics: Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Dr. Strangelove. Clips from
the film proliferate on YouTube, especially Dr. Strangelove’s final War
Room speech to President Muffley and “Buck” Turgidson in which the
doctor, an ex-Nazi who twice addresses the president as “Mein Führer”
by accident, expounds his bizarre theories on the survivability of a
nuclear holocaust. Much of Seller’s work as Strangelove was improvised,
and Kubrick, recognizing Seller’s genius at creating such a horrifically

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 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s

comedic character, gave him free reign. Uncharacteristically for such a

meticulous filmmaker, Kubrick even included a take near the end of the
film in which Peter Bull, playing the Russian ambassador, is clearly start-
ing to laugh—or as the British put it, “corpse”—in the middle of a scene,
reacting to the extreme energy and absurdity of Seller’s performance as
the wheelchair-bound, partially paralyzed Dr. Strangelove.
Sellers was originally supposed to play Major “King” Kong as well as
the other three roles, but he never felt comfortable with the Kong part,
and after he “sprained an ankle” (accounts vary to this day as to whether
or not Sellers faked the accident to get out of the role), Kubrick offered
the role to John Wayne, who instantly turned it down cold (Hill, 2001:
118–119). Slim Pickens was then offered the part, and played the role
as a straight dramatic part, offering a neat contrast to the utterly over-
the-top portrayal of Buck Turgidson by George C. Scott. Interestingly,
Scott later claimed that Kubrick had tricked him into delivering such a
manic performance by encouraging the actor to mug through a series
of outrageously exaggerated rehearsal takes, and then incorporating
them—after shooting a series of supposedly “official” takes—into the
finished film (Jones, 2004). Dr. Strangelove was also scripted to conclude
with a huge, Three Stooges–style pie fight in the War Room, which was
actually filmed, but cut before the film’s release because Kubrick thought
such obvious slapstick would move the film into the realm of pure farce,
and blunt its satiric edge.
Typically, Kubrick took his time filming the project, and did multiple
takes on nearly all of the setups, often with different interpretations.
Sometimes, this led to complications. Dr. Strangelove was James Earl
Jones’ first film as an actor, as Bombardier Lothar Zogg, and while he
was thrilled to be working with Kubrick on any project, the logistics of
the film were daunting. Jones remembered that
Stanley was unfailingly polite and even-tempered on the set. After every
take that didn’t work, even the 100th, he would say nothing more than “Let’s
try that again.” [But] it was also true that Stanley was a control freak of the
highest order and ran his set more like a dictator than a director. He treated
actors as if they were technical elements in his design, not as creative profes-
sionals like himself. I had decidedly uncomfortable moments as an actor
under Stanley’s direction. One day, hours before I was scheduled to be on
the set, I was hustled into costume to shoot a scene full of Air Force techno-
jargon. I had learned the lines. But in the weeks of waiting around to shoot
the scene I had forgotten them, and Kubrick said, “You mean you don’t know

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 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s 

your words?” He momentarily stopped chewing his gum and then said very
coldly, “Let’s move to the next set.” I felt uncomfortable with him afterward.
(Jones, 2004)

Indeed, Kubrick would as a matter of course film scenes over and over
again, until he got precisely what he wanted, no matter what. The scene
in which Slim Pickens, as “King” Kong, rides a falling nuclear bomb to
Earth like a rodeo cowboy, for example, was filmed numerous times,
with Pickens doing one take as stoically as Buster Keaton, and others
with a degree of surprise, bemusement, or even shock. Throughout the
film, then, Kubrick was ceaselessly experimenting with every aspect of
the production.
While Kubrick went on to a variety of other projects, most notably
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), with great success, he never again achieved
the perfection of this peculiar mix of the absurd and the all-too-real. As
he told critic Joseph Gelmis,
My idea of doing [the film] as a nightmare comedy came in the early weeks
of working on the screenplay . . . As I kept trying to imagine the way in which
things would really happen, ideas kept coming to me which I would discard
because they were so ludicrous. I kept saying to myself, “I can’t do that—people
will laugh.” But after a month or so I began to realize that all the things I was
throwing out were the things that were most truthful. (Stillman, 2008: 488)

Which, of course, is precisely why they had to stay in, why they have
such comic resonance, and why Dr. Strangelove has retained its luster
as an unalloyed “dark” comic masterpiece. As director Sydney Pollack
commented, looking back on his first viewing of the film, “I remember
watching it the first time, seeing Slim Pickens riding that bomb, think-
ing, ‘how does somebody think that up?’ ” (Stillman, 2008: 487). Or, as
Kubrick himself told critic Eugene Archer,
It’s all very elusive and very rich. There’s nothing like trying to create it. It gives
you a sense of omnipotence—it’s one of the most exciting things you can find
without being under the influence of drugs . . . If I told you [the meanings of
my films] it wouldn’t be ambiguous—and if you didn’t discover it for yourself,
it wouldn’t mean anything anyway. (Stillman, 2008: 487)

There is a curious postscript to the making of Dr. Strangelove. At the

same time that Kubrick was making his film, director Sidney Lumet was
preparing to shoot Fail Safe (1964), a deadly serious look at the possibil-
ity of a nuclear holocaust, from a novel by Eugene Burdick and Harvey
Wheeler, which had almost the same exact plot line as Peter George’s

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 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s

Red Alert. Indeed, George was so incensed by the similarities between

Red Alert and the novel Fail Safe that he sued Burdick and Wheeler for
plagiarism, ending in an out-of-court settlement. Kubrick then sued the
producers of Fail Safe, the movie, arguing that since the novel Fail Safe
had been shown to have an intellectual debt to Red Alert, the release of
Fail Safe as a film would harm Dr. Strangelove’s chances at the box office.
As writer Crosby Day notes, “Ultimately, Kubrick prevailed. Columbia
Pictures, which was committed to Dr. Strangelove, took over distribu-
tion of Fail Safe and agreed to release Fail Safe after Dr. Strangelove.
Dr. Strangelove opened in December 1963, while Fail Safe hit the screens
in October 1964.” As a result, Dr. Strangelove was a huge hit, while Fail
Safe did only modest business.
Death has often been used to comic effect in films, but an all-out
assault on what Jessica Mitford termed “the American way of death” is
another thing entirely. Loosely based on Evelyn Waugh’s acerbic novel of
the same name on life, death, and the attendant collapse of civilization in
Hollywood, Tony Richardson’s The Loved One (1965) was a stand-alone
film even in a decade devoted to dark humor; indeed, it was boldly
advertised as “the motion picture with something to offend everyone,”
and largely lived up to its billing. Though hampered by Haskell Wexler’s
uncharacteristically stolid camerawork (Richardson hired Wexler
because of his signature hand-held “newsreel” style, but was appalled
when Wexler categorically refused to utilize it on the film—more on
this later) and an uneven screenplay by Terry Southern and Christopher
Isherwood, the film still succeeds on a number of counts. America was
becoming death obsessed in the mid-1960s, with the costs of funerals
and memorials rising dramatically.
The Loved One centers on the Whispering Glades cemetery—a
stand-in for Hollywood’s Forest Lawn Memorial Park—where the
corrupt Reverend Wilbur Glenworth (Jonathan Winters) presides over
a kingdom of death. His key aide is Mr. Joyboy (a suitably effete Rod
Steiger), who is the chief embalmer, assisted by Aimee Thanatogenous
(Anjanette Comer), who helps to “make up” the corpses that pass
through Whispering Glades for their final public appearance. Into
this complicated scenario comes Dennis Barlow (a very young Robert
Morse), as a clueless Briton trying to ingratiate himself with the “British
Colony” in Hollywood, with the help of his uncle, Sir Francis Hinsley
(John Gielgud). Dennis falls madly in love with Aimee, but Joyboy is
also attracted to her, and a love match ensues.

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Meanwhile, the “Blessed Reverend” is becoming worried that

Whispering Glades is no longer a money-spawning operation. The
graveyard is filling up, and he’s running out of room; at first, Glenworthy
tries to increase profits by holding back-to-back weddings and funerals
in the same chapel, each performed in a matter of minutes, with canned
music cues (both presided over by the unctuous actor Ed Reimers in an
unbilled cameo; in real life, Reimers shilled for both Crest Toothpaste
and Allstate Insurance). But it’s not enough; there has to be a way to
increase revenue. Suddenly, Reverend Glenworthy is seized with an
inspiration. Instead of a cemetery, Whispering Glades can be turned into
a retirement complex, assuring continual turnover and a constant stream
of revenue. There’s only one problem; what to do with all those pesky
bodies buried at Whispering Glades? “There’s got to be a way to get those
stiffs off my property!” Glenworthy barks to one of his subordinates, and
indeed, there is.
Glenworthy’s brother, Henry (also played by Winters), runs a pet
cemetery, and has hit upon a scheme to shoot the bodies of the dead
pets he must dispose of into space, using the assistance of the boyish
scientific whiz kid Gunther Fry (the always appalling Paul Williams).
Reverend Glenworthy decides to do the same with the remains of the
bodies interred at Whispering Glades, causing Aimee to panic—for her,
Whispering Glades is something sacred, and eternal. Discovering that
the Reverend’s plan is indeed “Resurrection Now” (as he christens his
“space disposal” plan for public consumption), Aimee embalms herself
with Joyboy’s equipment, while Reverend Glenworthy hosts an orgy in
the establishment’s funeral parlor for the Air Force to obtain surplus
rockets to carry out his plan. In the film’s mordant conclusion, Aimee’s
body is jettisoned into space as the Reverend’s plan takes hold, and
Dennis, disgusted with his entire experience in Tinseltown, returns to
England.
The Loved One seldom misses a chance to offend, but at the same time
skirts close to the edge of bad taste without really venturing into truly
forbidden territory. Even with the casting of Tab Hunter as a Whispering
Glades tour guide, and Liberace (in one of the film’s most effective bits) as
an unctuous coffin salesman (“Oh” he says to a prospective client without
a hint of irony, “you’ll be the death of me, sir”), not to mention the grossly
overweight Ayllene Gibbons as Joyboy’s mother (“call me anything you
want, but don’t call me late to dinner” she remarked on the set), the film
ultimately seems less than the sum of its parts. Wexler’s insistently flat

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 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s

camerawork—mostly static lock-offs with little camera movement—is

one of the chief problems with the film, but sadly Richardson, a white
hot property after the smashing success of Tom Jones (1963), could do
nothing about it. Wexler, surprisingly, was also a producer on the film,
along with studio veteran John Calley, and overruled Richardson’s pleas
for a more flexible visual style. Tired of being typecast in the industry as
a “hand-held” cinematographer, Wexler saw a chance to bring solidity,
to say nothing of stolidity, to the project, and insistently did so to the
detriment of film.
Hal Ashby, later a director of considerable note in his own right,
especially with Being There (1979), a dark comedy in which the imbecilic
Chauncey Gardiner (Peter Sellers) rises to the heights of US politics by
simply parroting lines from the television shows he obsessively watches,
edited The Loved One with a firm hand, but faced with Wexler’s mono-
lithic camera setups, didn’t have much latitude in the final cut. As a result,
The Loved One ultimately seems flat, overly long and distant, removed
from its source material—an ambitious failure, but a failure nonetheless.
Viewing a rough cut of the film, John Gielgud thought that both he and
Liberace came off best, but that the film as a whole didn’t jell (Morley,
2002: 350). Critic Donald W. McCaffrey agreed, arguing that Richardson
used “a rather heavy hand” in creating the film, with little allowance for
nuance (1983: 86). He continued,
As a movie The Loved One is a flawed work. Even as a novel it might be
considered a narrow, carping attack by [source novelist Evelyn Waugh] who
had his novel, Brideshead Revisited, rejected by Hollywood. Nevertheless, in
both media it remains in the rare world of satire—a world that does not have
the popular appeal of light, inoffensive comedy. (McCaffrey, 1983: 87)

As the 1960s progressed, dark comedy became almost a mainstream

genre in itself, as evidenced by such films as George Axelrod’s acidic satire
Lord Love a Duck (1966), in which high school student Alan Musgrave
(Roddy McDowall, at this point certainly a bit old for the part) plots the
rise to stardom of the insipid Barbara Ann Greene (played to perfection
by Tuesday Weld). Alan is obsessed with Barbara Ann, but she only has
eyes for Bob Bernard (Martin West), a straight arrow churchgoer whom
she decides to marry. Desiring only Barbara Ann’s happiness, Alan
facilitates the match by keeping Barbara Ann’s disapproving mother,
Stella (Ruth Gordon), in a perpetual drunken stupor. Then, suddenly
and capriciously, Barbara Ann decides that what she really wants to be is

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 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s 

a movie star, after a chance meeting with producer T. Harrison Belmont

(Martin Gabel). But Bob disapproves, so Alan decides to kill him.
The balance of the film—with side trips to various equally outrageous
subplots—consists of Alan’s repeated attempts to kill Bob before they all
graduate from high school.
By the time the graduation ceremony rolls around, Bob is still alive,
though in a wheelchair, but Alan decides he’s fooled around long
enough. Commandeering a bulldozer from a construction site, Alan
runs down practically everyone at the ceremony, finally killing Bob, but
also a host of other innocent bystanders. Barbara Ann fulfills her dream,
starring in Bikini Widow, and is feted at the film’s gala premiere. Alan, in
prison, dictates all of this into a tape recorder as a flashback—indeed,
we first see Alan in prison at the start of the film, but have no idea how
he got there. Now, all becomes clear. Alan, who goes by the nickname
“Mollymawk”—after the real-life bird the Mollymawk, a member of the
albatross family—has gotten his wish. Barbara Ann is a star, if only for
the moment. In a dash of Alain Resnais–style memory editing, Alan
“sees” Barbara Ann in hand-held newsreel footage at the premiere of
her movie, as he concludes his tale. “Oh, you poor bunny” he murmurs,
knowing that Barbara Ann’s celebrity can’t possibly last.
Lord Love a Duck is an odd film in many respects. George Axelrod
was better known as a screenwriter than a director, with the Broadway
comedies The Seven Year Itch (1952) and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?
(1955) as perhaps his most famous credits, both of which were made
into highly successful films, and both of which had a sharply satiric
edge in their construction, taking on the temptations of infidelity in
Itch, and the perils of instant fame in Rock Hunter. But Lord Love a Duck
was his directorial debut, and given the chance to say what he wanted
about American society with a relative lack of censorship, Axelrod
pulled out all the stops. Barbara Ann is the perfect mindless consumer,
who writhes with orgasmic ecstasy at the thought of an expensive
cashmere sweater, oozes sex but professes to have no inkling of her
kittenish ways, and is as devoid of thought as a hot air balloon. Her
mother, Stella, is a mean tempered drunk; her husband is a dedicated
follower of conformity in all its aspects. The high school that Barbara
Ann, Alan, and Bob attend is utterly lacking in culture or guidance,
and the largely absent teachers (heard, for the most part, as voices over
the school’s PA system) are dedicated to preserving the status quo, and
nothing more.

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 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s

The height of cinematic expression that Barbara Ann aspires to is star-

ring in “beach party” films, and mall shopping is the highest form of
cultural expression. It’s Southern California in the 1960s to a “T”: empty,
slick, attractive, and utterly disposable. As with Al Hine’s 1961 source
novel of the same name, Lord Love a Duck is an act of outrage against
an empty culture based on rampant consumerism, giving us nothing for
something. “This motion picture is an act of pure aggression,” the film’s
poster proudly declared, and for once, the result was truth in advertis-
ing. Or, as the Godardian intertitles admonished the audience during
the film’s opening sequence, “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Go
to School. Get a little Knowledge. Live dangerously.”
Karel Reisz’s Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966) has a
similarly bleak view of humanity, though tinged with a large dose of
surrealism and gallows humor. In one of his finest performances, David
Warner plays the impractical, daydreaming Marxist, Morgan Delt, who
is divorced from his wife Leonie (Vanessa Redgrave), but cannot give
her up, and particularly resents the idea of her remarrying the upper
crust and conventional Charles Napier (Robert Stephens), and “creat-
ing a whole bunch of little Napiers” in the process. Morgan’s only real
friend and confidant is his mother, played by Irene Handl, an old-line
Communist who shares Morgan’s disdain for the “ruling class.” Morgan
also has a fetish for gorillas, and likes to dress up in a gorilla suit, as
well as thumping on his chest as a gorilla would whenever he feels in the
mood to bed Leonie, who still retains a large degree of affection for him.
But when Leonie and Charles decide to tie the knot, it pushes Morgan
over the edge. Dressing up in his gorilla suit, he crashes the wedding,
and kidnaps Leonie, taking her to an isolated lake in the country where,
despite his actions, Leonie succumbs to his advances once again. However,
this time, Morgan has stepped too far over the edge, and the authorities
intervene. Leonie is restored to Charles, while Morgan is committed to a
rather bucolic insane asylum, where he happily tends a large flowerbed
he has created in the shape of a hammer and sickle. Leonie comes to visit
Morgan one last time in the asylum, visibly pregnant, and whispers to
Morgan that the child is his, not Napier’s. Morgan quietly smiles with
triumphant satisfaction, and returns to his gardening.
Reisz’s film is many things: a telling critique of the inequities of the
British class system, and absurdist comedy (complete with clips from
King Kong [1933] to spice up the proceedings, when Morgan fantasizes
about his beloved gorillas), a political allegory, and a mirror of London

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 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s 

at the time, in which the Bohemian and upper crust classes comfortably
mixed together in an uneasy but generally peaceful truce. At the end of
the film, no one really holds anything against Morgan, and the “fascist
state” that he has railed against for most of Morgan will take care of him
now, even as a marginal member of society. As outré as David Mercer’s
screenplay for Morgan is, the film sends out an unmistakable message
of tolerance and inclusion for all, making it the gentlest of the dark
comedies discussed here, and also one of the most hauntingly romantic.
I’ll Never Forget What’s ’is Name (1967), directed by the notoriously
uneven Michael Winner, is another matter altogether. Oliver Reed plays
Quint, a moody, dissatisfied advertising man who hates what he does
for a living, and goes so far as to bury an ax in his boss’s desk (while his
boss is sitting at the desk) to make manifest his seething hatred of the
advertising profession. In this case, his boss, Jonathan Lute, is played by
none other than Orson Welles, strolling through the role of a powerful
media baron with studied nonchalance, as if none of Quint’s escapades
bother him in the slightest, which is more or less true. Resigning from
the agency, and his life, Quint seeks refuge in the world of swinging
London, only to find it as false as the “straight” world he abhors. Quint
hopes to chuck the ad game and set up a “serious” literary magazine, an
endeavor that is mercilessly lampooned throughout the film, but can’t
keep his mind on his work long enough to get anything done; he’s too
busy seducing every available woman in his life, despite the fact that
he is already married to his long suffering wife Louise (Wendy Craig),
though the two have long been separated. Quint’s main obsession is the
waiflike Georgina (Carol White), who can’t decide whether to sleep with
Quint or not.
But the literary life proves just as corrupt as the ad game, as personified
in particular by the personage of his friend Nicholas (Norman Rodway),
who talks a good game, but eventually sells out to the “establishment” for
a large check. Defeated, Quint returns to work at Lute’s ad agency, where
he creates a savage commercial for a new Super 8mm movie camera,
which recapitulates many of the ideas he’s tried to reject, and centers
on Lute’s bleak assertion that “the number one product of all human
endeavor is waste—waste.” The resultant ad is the talk of the industry,
but Quint wants none of it. Feted by his colleagues, Quint wins an adver-
tising award for his efforts, but throws the trophy into the Thames. Life
is pointless, and both the avant-garde and the business world are equally

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 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s

bankrupt, morally, artistically, and spiritually. As critic Ian Jarvie noted

when the film first appeared:
I’ll Never Forget What’s ’is Name . . . locates the swinging world firmly among
the ad-men . . . Winner shows the influence of Richard Lester and pop art
even more than television [and focuses on] the hero’s search for integrity
in a world of false values . . . Andrew Quint seems to have everything in the
way of material and sexual success. But editing a literary magazine is what
he really wants to do. He finally knuckles under again to Lute, making us
wonder if this is not a case of his world of integrity being more fantasy than
the tiresome swinging world he wants to escape. The tables are turned. For
the ad-men, the outside world is a comforting fantasy, swingingness is real.
They hate their real world . . . (Jarvie, 1969: 16)

But, as Quint knows, and Michael Winner certainly found out later in his
career, when he went on to direct the increasingly dreary series of Death
Wish films, the world is always with us. Capitulation is the only course
ultimately open to most of us, buckling under to a variety of social and
business pressures.
The real world is certainly always present in the life of Dr. Sidney Schaefer
(James Coburn), the central figure of Theodore J. Flicker’s The President’s
Analyst (1967). Again, the premise of the film is simple, yet absurd. The
president of the United States, never seen but continually referenced
throughout the film, is becoming dangerously neurotic, unhinged by the
vast responsibilities of state. Enter Dr. Schaefer, assigned by worried White
House staff members to ease the chief executive’s worried mind. But as the
president spews forth his accumulated fears and concerns, Dr. Schaefer
himself starts to crumble under the weight of the president’s confidences.
As a condition of his employment, Dr. Schaefer’s job has to remain secret,
and he can tell no one—not even his girlfriend, Nan (Joan Delaney)—the
president’s secrets. Soon, Dr. Schaefer becomes hopelessly paranoid,
convinced that everyone is spying on him, to determine whether or not he
has become a security risk. And, of course, he’s correct in this assumption;
everyone is spying on him, even Nan, so Dr. Schaefer drops out into the
countercultural underground, where he meets a group of hedonistic hippies
led by pop singer Barry McGuire as “Old Wrangler” (McGuire’s biggest hit
as a performer, ironically, was the top 10 single Eve of Destruction).
But the film’s central narrative soon expands into a much more complex
conspiracy plot, involving the CEA, or Central Enquiries Agency
(standing in for the CIA), the FBR, or Federal Bureau of Regulation
(the FBI), and even the KGB, as Schaefer’s flight from the front lines of

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 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s 

politics becomes an international incident. But in a final twist, the real

villains of the piece are not the CEA, the FBR, or even the KGB, but
rather TPC—The Phone Company, modeled after the then monopolistic
Bell Telephone System, which plans to brainwash the American public,
and gradually take over the government. In 2008, Coburn recalled the
genesis of this decidedly unusual project, telling Alex Simon
Ted Flicker I met while we were shooting [Stanley Donen’s] Charade [1964]
in Paris. He’d come over to meet with his friend Peter Stone, who’d written
the picture. So Ted was sitting in the background with his big black shades,
watching us shoot. So Peter introduced us [and then] George Peppard and
Elizabeth Ashley were having a Christmas party a few years later. Ted was
there. He said, “I’ve just finished a script called The President’s Analyst.” I said,
“That’s an intriguing title. Do you have a deal on it?” He said, “No.” So I took
it home, read it, and wanted to do it. Ted said he wanted to direct it, so I
said, “Let me talk to Paramount.” I had just done Waterhole No. 3 [dir. William
Graham, 1967] over there. Robert Evans had just taken over, [and] he loved
it. Peter Bart read it, loved it. They said, “Can he direct?” I said, “I dunno, let’s
find out.” So they put the whole deal together in five days! It was Evans’ first
film at Paramount. There are some great scenes in there. It was named one of
the finest political films of the decade by the Sunday Times in London, [but]
Ted Flicker never did another movie. He moved out to New Mexico, [after
he] did one hit TV show [Barney Miller], and [now] sculpts, paints.

While The President’s Analyst was a commercial failure when it was first
released—and indeed, it almost didn’t get made, since the FBI strongly
objected to the film’s storyline, to say nothing of the CIA’s misgivings, all
of which were ultimately ignored—the film has long since become an
off-the-wall classic, one of those films that captures not only an era, but
also a feeling (in this case, rampant paranoia crossed with drug-induced
ecstasy) that dominated the political landscape of the 1960s. As critic
Patricia Moir notes,
Flicker’s genius lies in his ability to see all sides of the issues facing the
American public. He is aware that “dropping out” is no more a solution than
“buying in,” that violence is not only a threat but also a necessary means of
defense. His protagonists are finally able to achieve an uneasy equilibrium by
taking a warily subversive position within the establishment, but they must
remain constantly on guard, using the security and surveillance skills of their
enemies even as they are monitored by those in higher positions. Flicker’s
world is one in which paranoia is not a delusion but an entirely appropriate
and healthy response to reality. (Moir, 1997: 52)

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 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s

As the 1960s drew to a close, so did the string of dark comedies; the real
world was bleak enough, and audiences began to prize artificial optimism
over satiric criticism. John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 was seen at
the time as aberrational; but by the end of the decade, Martin Luther
King, Bobby Kennedy, and Malcolm X had also been assassinated, and
the public’s taste for “sick humor” started to wane. Simply surviving
seemed a tough enough goal. Stanley Donen’s Bedazzled (1967), an updat-
ing of the Faust legend with Peter Cook as Satan and Dudley Moore as
the hapless Stanley Moon, a short order cook, offered a graphic demon-
stration of the hopelessness of ambition. Stanley wants to be loved by
Margaret (Eleanor Bron), a waitress at the Wimpy hamburger restaurant
he works in, and Satan promises to help him in his quest with a series of
seven wishes, but every time Stanley thinks up what he imagines to be a
foolproof plan for romantic bliss, Satan can’t resist adding a little wrinkle
to frustrate Stanley’s dreams.
For one wish, Stanley asks to be a pop star, and his wish is granted;
shrieking a wanton ballad of unbridled lust, “Love Me,” on television, he
seems to have attained Margaret’s love, until Satan, appearing in the role
of a rival pop singer, begins intoning a dirge-like song of rejection (“You
turn me off—go away—you disgust me—I’m not available”) that proves
to be the next new trend in rock music, rendering Stanley’s pleading
ballads obsolete. Stanley’s numerous other attempts to seduce Margaret,
as an intellectual bachelor, and finally as a nun, also fail to work. At the
end of the film, Stanley manages to escape from Satan’s clutches through
a loophole in his contract, and is back at his old post, frying burgers, but
this time, content with his lot. The film’s message is clear; one must be
content with what one has, and not hope for more. Ambition, in a sense,
is potentially disastrous.
Ambition also drives the crazed theatrical producer Max Bialystock
(Zero Mostel) and the credulous accountant Leo Bloom (Gene Wilder)
to concoct a fantastic swindle in Mel Brooks’ first film as a director,
and one of his best, The Producers (1968). Bialystock, once the toast of
Broadway, has been enduring a long run of flops, and is now reduced to
sleeping with a string of elderly women for money to finance his increas-
ingly impoverished lifestyle—and hopefully, his next play. But Leo comes
up, albeit accidentally, with an even more ingenious scheme—deliberately
produce a flop, oversell the production (ultimately, by 27,000) to a
group of unsuspecting investors, and then fly to Rio de Janeiro with the
proceeds, because, as Leo points out, “no one audits a failure.” Casting

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 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s 

about for the “right” property, the two men come upon the script for
Springtime for Hitler, a play written by a psychotic former Nazi, Franz
Liebkind (Kenneth Mars), who still dreams of restoring his beloved
Führer’s reputation to its former “glory.”
Hiring an incompetent director, a drug-dazed actor for the role of
Hitler, and even bribing the critics on the opening night, Bialystock
and Bloom (now “partners” in the spurious enterprise) are certain that
the play will close immediately. But with the acid casualty Lorenzo St.
DuBois, or LSD (Dick Shawn) as Hitler, camping it up on stage and
improvising dialogue as he goes along, the audience, at first repelled,
suddenly acclaims the play a riotous satire, “which will run for years.”
Bialystock, Bloom, and Liebkind then try to blow up the theater to
prevent further performances of the musical, but are caught in the act,
apprehended, and sent to prison. But, it seems, they haven’t learned
from their mistakes. As the film ends, Bialystock and Bloom are mount-
ing a new musical in prison, Prisoners of Love, and again overselling the
production.
As with many of the films discussed in this chapter, The Producers
was only a modest hit when first released, as it managed to literally
offend nearly every segment of the audience. Zero Mostel’s dalliances
with a succession of aging dowagers is a start, but when you fold in a
bimboesque “secretary” whom Bialystock hires to dance around the
office just so he can ogle her, a series of deliberately insulting gay stere-
otypes (Christopher Hewitt as the inept director Robert De Bris, and
Andréas Vontsinas as his equally flamboyant assistant Carmen Ghia), to
say nothing of the central plot premise, a musical that seemingly glori-
fies Hitler and “the master race,” well, you’ve pretty much hit on all the
bases.
Oddly enough, the film won the 1968 Academy Award for “Best
Writing, Story and Screenplay—Written Directly for the Screen”—to
Mel Brooks, of course—but despite the film’s meager budget of less than
a million dollars, The Producers failed to secure an effective release, and
never reached a mass audience. Ironically, when Brooks adapted the film
into a Broadway musical in 2001, starring Nathan Lane and Matthew
Broderick, the once “verboten” property suddenly became a smash hit,
so much so that Brooks produced another film in 2005, based on the
musical version of The Producers, directed by Susan Stroman, which also
met with considerable commercial success. But neither project had the
authentic bite of the original film.

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 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s

In 1969, as the decade entered its final days, a young upstart in New
York City decided that time was ripe for a really offensive film, one that
would truly knock down what little remained of the barriers to bad taste.
Robert Downey, Sr.’s Putney Swope, made for a mere $120,000, chronicled
the rise to power of the eponymous title character, played by Arnold
Johnson, as the “token black” on the board of an exquisitely corrupt
advertising agency, who accidentally becomes the chairman of the board
when the former chairman dies of a heart attack in the middle of a pres-
entation to his staff. The other members of the board quickly vote on his
successor, but since the bylaws prevent anyone for voting for himself,
they all vote for Swope, whom they all figure no one else will endorse.
Swope immediately fires the entire board, with the exception of
Nathan (Stan Gottlieb), an old timer he can easily manipulate, and hires
his African American friends as board members, renaming the agency
the Truth and Soul Agency, or, as he puts it, “TS, baby!” At first, the new
agency is shunned by advertisers, but Wing Soney (Tom Odachi) breaks
the ice when he comes looking for someone to plug his new invention,
the “Get Outta Here Mousetrap.” Swope immediately turns to Nathan,
who delivers an impromptu pitch for a TV spot centering on Christopher
Columbus’ “discovering” America, and then “knocking an Indian on his
ass—then cut to a picture of a Get Outta Here Mousetrap, tell them how
much it is and where to buy it, and that’s it.” Soney is amazed, reflexively
asking, “who’s your shrink?,” but then announces that he “digs it,” and
signs on as a client. The resulting ad campaign is a huge success.
Soon, other manufacturers, such as Mr. Victrola Cola (Ed Gordon),
are beating a path to Swope’s door. As he tells Swope, “I got this great
window cleaner. Cleans good and doesn’t streak. Smells bad, though.
Cleans good, but smells bad.” Swope has an instant and completely
unscrupulous solution: “as a window cleaner, forget it. Put soybeans in it,
and market it as a soft drink in the ghetto. We’ll put a picture of a rhythm
and blues singer on the front and call it Victrola Cola.” And, of course,
Swope’s plan works. Soon the Truth and Soul Agency is busy pitching
breakfast cereal, in another innovative 30 second TV spot, featuring a
1930s African American man sitting at his kitchen table, wolfing down
cereal. The narrator intones, in a voiceover, “Jim Keranga of Watts,
California, is eating a bowl of Ethereal Cereal, the heavenly breakfast.
Jim, did you know that Ethereal has 25 more riboflavin than any other
cereal on the market? Ethereal also packs the added punch of .002 ESP
units of pectin!” Keranga considers this for a moment, and then says

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 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s 

simply, “No shit!” as the commercial cuts to black. Then there’s the ad for
Face Off Pimple Cream, featuring an interracial teenage romance set to
this catchy jingle, sung by the young woman in the commercial:
He gave me a soul kiss
It sure was grand
He gave me a dry hump
Behind the hot dog stand

and ending with the catch phrase “he’s really out of sight . . . and so are his
pimples.”
Soon Putney and his associates are rolling in cash, but Putney has
had enough. Raiding the agency’s treasury, he is about to abscond with
the payroll when he is intercepted by an employee known as The Arab
(Antonio Fargas, in an early role, before he went on to play Huggy Bear
in the Starsky and Hutch television series), who knocks the suitcase of cash
out of Swope’s hand, scattering it all over the firm’s gymnasium. In the
end, no one gets the money, and Putney and the agency are shut down for
good. Downey, a born rebel, started his career writing scripts for movies
in the US Army’s stockade, where he was confined for “bad conduct.”
At first, Downey wrote short plays, such as What Else Is There (1960), in
which, in Downey’s words, “the actors played [nuclear] missiles, in silos,
ready to go off. It was kinda wild, pretty ahead of its time” (Dixon, 2007:
121). From this Downey progressed to Babo 73 (1964), a feature length
comedy starring veteran underground actor Taylor Mead as the presi-
dent of the United States, which he shot on location in Washington, DC,
for less than $3,000. As Downey noted,
Tom O’Horgan, who later went on to do Hair, did the music. That was shot in
16mm, and we just basically went down to the White House and started shoot-
ing, with no press passes, permits, anything like that. Kennedy was in Europe,
so nobody was too tight with the security. We were outside the White House
mainly, ran around. We actually threw Taylor in with some real generals, and
they of course were appalled by what we were trying to do. (Dixon, 2007: 122)

This led to Chafed Elbows (1966), Downey’s first film in 35mm, in which a
mother and son fall in love, get married, go on welfare, and then the film
turns into a musical. A solid commercial hit, Chafed Elbows led to Putney
Swope, and Downey’s career as a radical satirist was born. Since then, he has
been involved in a variety of other projects, but for many, the sheer nerve
and the intentional abrasiveness of his early films remains unique; indeed,
Putney Swope was Downey’s biggest critical and commercial success.

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 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s

As we leave the decade, there’s one last film to consider; Kevin

Billington’s British film The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer (1970). Shot
in 1969, Rimmer is perhaps the least familiar of all the films discussed in
this chapter, but perhaps that’s because it’s so prescient, and so absolutely
plausible. Peter Cook plays Michael Rimmer, a mysterious social climber
with the power to easily manipulate all those around him to do exactly
what he pleases. Walking in unannounced to a small, failing advertising
agency, Rimmer soon becomes the managing director of the company,
then smoothly insinuates himself into politics. With almost supernatural
ease, he rises to the head of the conservative government, and soon
becomes the prime minister of Britain, using a variety of publicity ploys,
duplicitous campaign tactics, and jingoistic sloganeering.
At the end of the film, Rimmer is poised to assume almost dictato-
rial powers over the remnants of the British Empire. Cook’s portrayal
of Rimmer is cool, distanced, and soothingly sardonic, charming those
whom he finds useful, and swiftly abandoning those below. Some have
criticized Cook’s performance as being too detached and hollow, but I
would argue that it captures the essence of political and social fraudu-
lence; the hearty handshake that means nothing, the “sincere” smile that
prefigures imminent personal betrayal, the lack of interest in others that
marks a supreme narcissist, who is only interested in himself, and even
more than that, in unchecked power.
The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer is thus a perfect film with which to
conclude this chapter; in its slick packaging, its bone dry humor, and the
fact that it brought together rising talents—future Monty Python stars
John Cleese and Graham Chapman collaborated on the film’s screenplay
with Cook and Billington, and playwright Harold Pinter appeared in a
significant supporting part—while also utilizing the talents of such gifted
“dark” humor artistes as Dennis Price, Denholm Elliott, and Arthur
Lowe as members of the old guard, whom Rimmer easily leapfrogs over
on his way to the top, the film is one of a kind. Kevin Billington, the
film’s director, was more of a documentarist than a feature filmmaker,
but he makes it work to his advantage, actually managing, in one scene,
to use the real Number 10 Downing Street as a shooting location when
Rimmer is installed as prime minister.
The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer is shot through with a sheen of
glossy, fashion magazine color; the days of black and white are now firmly
in the past. The 1960s are over, the 1970s are upon us. What will the films
of the new decade say about our life? And what will we remember about

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 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s 

the 1960s as a whole? Perhaps it will be a curious mixture of hope and

cynicism, fear and optimism, that always accompanies eras of dramatic
change, when all the existing social codes and mores are called into ques-
tion. The dark humored films of the 1960s gestured forward toward an as
yet undiscovered social order, while energetically lampooning, and thus
rejecting, existing behavioral models. But when you knock down all the
existing social structures, through mockery, street theater, or political
chase, what do you replace them with? With revolution comes change,
and with change comes uncertainty, as the Watergate 1970s, which shook
the foundation of the US political structure to the core, would soon
demonstrate.
When these groundbreaking films were made, they projected an air of
cheerful nihilism, as if the world they projected was simply too absurd
to exist; in the 1970s, and beyond, that nihilism had become the stuff of
everyday life. Despite their sardonic flair, the sick comedies of the 1960s
offered by default a rather romantic vision of a world in which egali-
tarianism, hope, and the possibility of change still seemed possible. Now,
that hope has vanished, and with it, the collective memory of these films,
which hoped to bring about reform through withering social criticism.
It didn’t work; the plutocrats won in the end. One percent of the popula-
tion now famously controls 99 of the world’s wealth. That’s a sort of
dystopia that even these dark films couldn’t have imagined, as we move
with uncertainty into the twenty-first century, our every movement
monitored by surveillance cameras and tracking devices.
In retrospect, it seems that the darkest, most nihilistic films of the 1960s
had their finger firmly on the pulse of the coming decade. We were leav-
ing the known for the unknown, and as in the world of Michael Rimmer,
superficial public impressions counted more than substance, style more
than content, and everyone was now cast adrift in a world where all the
old rules had been found hypocritical and, therefore suspect, and were
thus ridiculed, and abolished. The 1960s’ most cynical films had thus
accurately predicted the world we would now live in; our darkest, most
paranoid dreams come true. But in the end, these films—as daring as
they were at the time—paradoxically didn’t go far enough. Rather, they
offer us a look back at our better selves, when the excesses these films
imagined seemed simultaneously grotesque and remote. We could laugh
about these shortcomings then; now, it’s just everyday life. And that’s the
sickest joke of all.

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 2
A Cinema of Violence: The
Films of D. Ross Lederman
Abstract: Although he worked for two major studios for
the bulk of his career, Warner Brothers and Columbia,
D. (David) Ross Lederman specialized in genre films and
created his films swiftly, compactly, and with authority.
His films stand out because they all display Lederman’s
uniquely dystopian view of life, combined with a relentless,
inexorable narrative drive. In his best films, Lederman not
only bent the rules of genre cinema, he all but abolished
them. The sheer intensity of Lederman’s imagistic and
editorial pacing, coupled with his encyclopedic knowledge
of genre filmmaking, allowed him to transcend the
conventions of the typical program film, no matter what
the genre, and make it a personal project.

Dixon, Wheeler Winston. Dark Humor in Films of the

1960s. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
doi: 10.1057/9781137562500.0005.

 DOI: 10.1057/9781137562500.0005
 A Cinema of Violence: The Films of D. Ross Lederman 

In the Golden Age of the classical Hollywood cinema, from the late
1920s to the early 1960s, there were numerous “contract directors”
who labored for the major Hollywood studios. Some, like Don Siegel,
have achieved a degree of immortality for their later work, while their
earlier efforts are often ignored; others, like Irving Cummings, Roy Del
Ruth, André De Toth, Edward Cline, and David Butler have all but been
forgotten. All were conscientious studio craftsmen. Yet in the midst of
the Hollywood studio system, one director created a stylistic signature
so unmistakable as to make his work immediately recognizable, both
because of his audacious visual stylization, and his bizarre, often-
surrealistic compression of both narrative and character.
Working for two major studios for the bulk of his career, Warner
Bros. and Columbia, D. (David) Ross Lederman specialized in genre
films, and created them swiftly, compactly, and with unassailable
authority. Lederman’s films stand out from those of his more tradi-
tional studio colleagues because they display his uniquely dystopian
view of life; a relentless, inexorable narrative drive; rapid, nearly
Eisensteinian camera setups; and a willingness to alter or change
the course of his character’s destiny at a moment’s notice. In his best
films, Lederman not only bent the rules of genre cinema, he all but
abolished them. The sheer intensity of Lederman’s imagistic and
editorial pacing, coupled with his encyclopedic knowledge of genre
filmmaking, allowed him to transcend the conventions of the typical
program film, no matter what the genre, and make it a personal state-
ment, while still staying firmly within the proscribed schedule and
budget.
A prolific director with more than 85 feature films to his credit
spanning back to the silent era, Lederman enjoyed his greatest
success at Warner Bros. in the 1940s, where, as we shall see, he
perfected his own peculiar style of hyperkinetic cinema. But behind
the slick surface of Lederman’s Westerns, crime films, and espionage
dramas, there is a darker story to tell. Through the kindness of his
daughter, Joan Neville, and access to Lederman’s personal papers, I
was able to reconstruct Lederman’s life—the life of, as Neville put it,
“a violent man” (Neville, 21 October 2005). It is not a pretty picture.
Lederman drove himself relentlessly in his work, and was equally
brutal in his private life. For the world of Lederman’s violent action
thrillers mirrored Lederman’s own approach to life: gruff, taciturn,
he was demanding of both himself and others. Actor Sid Melton, who

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 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s

appeared in one of Lederman’s later projects, the teleseries Captain

Midnight, recalled that
D. Ross Lederman directed all of the 39 episodes, which was unfortunate,
because he was a terrible director [particularly with the star of the series,
Richard Webb, in the title role of Captain Midnight] . . . I never worked with
him outside of Captain Midnight, but he was not a good director, and he was
a mean man, a very nasty man. He never gave us any rehearsal time. If Dick
Webb insisted, maybe he would let us do a run-through, but that was it. We
had to do them really fast. (Dixon, 2005: 17)

At the time, I thought that this was simply one person’s view, but as the
story of Lederman’s life and career unfolded during my research for
this chapter, nearly everyone who worked with Lederman shared this
opinion. He was an efficient, ruthlessly economical, unmistakably angry
man—a driven, controlling personality with an uncompromisingly
bleak vision of social affairs. Yet unlike other program directors, who
would typically stage their scenes with minimal coverage to speed up the
production process, Lederman continually employed a wide variety of
atmospheric camera angles, furious montages, and rapidly paced editing
in all his work, giving it an unmistakable edge of brutality, paranoia, and
violence.
Lederman was born on 12 December 1894, in Lancaster,
Pennsylvania. His parents, Luke Lederman and Laura Pauline Ross,
were an oddly matched pair. Young David Ross Lederman was,
surprisingly, a sickly child, with such severe asthma that his parents
were advised to move to the then smog-free Venice, California, for
their son’s health in 1904. But David’s relationship with his parents was
curiously distant. His father worked at Hambuger’s Department Store
in Los Angeles in a variety of managerial positions, and died in 1918.
His mother, Laura, was a somewhat eccentric figure who was known
as “Mother Lederman” for her habit of “adopting” soldiers going off to
fight World War I, giving them lavish gifts, cheery letters, and kisses at
the train station as they departed for the front. As one obituary noted,
“Mother Lederman’s”
cheering words of good-bye and sympathy were incidents at the departure of
every soldier from this district. She devoted her entire time to raising funds
to buy the simple gifts she presented to each soldier and to writing letters
to motherless boys and others after they had reached camp or somewhere
in France. William D. Stephens, then governor of California, expressed his
appreciation of “Mother Lederman’s” services in a personal letter of tribute

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 A Cinema of Violence: The Films of D. Ross Lederman 

to her devotion and a member of the war department gave them national
recognition with a similar letter. (“Announce Funeral,” n.pag.)

Another encomium at the time of her death noted that

Every train that pulled out of the district loaded with young men called to
the training camps also carried “Mother Lederman,” whose smiles and merry
words were among the last things in their ears as they entrained at the Los
Angeles station. She worked independently and asked no organization to
help her, but appealed individually to the public for the funds with which she
bought the comforts she placed in the hands of the departing soldiers. (“War
Worker Famed for Kisses Dies,” n.pag.)

As rewarding as this work might have been, “Mother Lederman” lost no

time remarrying after the death of her first husband, David’s father. On
2 April 1919, she married one Henry J. Stanley, the secretary of the Los
Angeles Draft Board, whom she met at the train station while seeing off
“her boys.” Her death at the age of 54 of “apoplexy” (“War Worker Famed
for Kisses Dies”) seemed, in some peculiar manner, to define Ross
Lederman’s later character. But typically, Lederman was taciturn about
the personal impact of his mother’s death, or anything else from his
youth, for that matter. As Lederman’s daughter, Joan Neville, noted on
the subject of her father’s childhood, “he never talked about it. He never
once spoke of his mother or his father. It was like they never existed. I
was an only child, and my father was an only child” (Neville, 21 October
2005).
The change in climate in Venice caused a marked improvement in
David’s health, and by his teens he was a muscular “jock” who could
usually be found at the athletic club, or on the baseball diamond.
Carefully preserved in his scrapbook of clippings is perhaps the only
positive mention of his name in the public record, enshrined next to
numerous obituaries of his mother; tellingly, there are no cuttings in
Lederman’s files on his father at all. In the early 1920s, Lederman was
involved in a baseball game on the beach in Venice, when a young
woman almost drowned in the surf, and Lederman was able to rescue
her. As the unsourced clipping notes,
Ross Lederman, one of the Venice ball players who went to Seal Beach
Sunday to play the team of that city, proved himself a hero when he risked
his life in the choppy surf to rescue a young woman who had been caught in
the crosstide and was being carried out to sea. Before lunch the visiting ball
players took a dip in the ocean. There was an exceptionally heavy current

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 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s

running. The young woman, whose name was not secured by the Venetians,
was carried far out into the surf by this current. Other bathers noticed her
helpless condition, and called for help. Lederman was the first to respond. It
required all his powerful strength to reach the woman before she sank for the
last time, and bring her back to the beach. Lederman was loudly applauded
by the spectators who lined the beach. (“Venetian Saves Life of Woman”)

Lederman was indeed becoming quite an athlete, and he needed all the
stamina he could muster as he finally broke into the motion picture
business in 1915 as an extra in Mack Sennett’s Keystone Kops series,
specializing in chase scenes and strenuous stunt gags. At the same time,
he was also working for D. W. Griffith as a second second assistant direc-
tor, although the term was unknown at the time, on Intolerance (released
in 1916). This grueling pace would continue for the rest of his life. From
1915 to 1927, Lederman racked up an impressive series of credits, rising
to the post of assistant director, often assisting Roy Del Ruth, who
became a lifelong friend. He also worked at Sennett’s studios on some
of the producer’s final silent films, such as the Keystone Kops tribute Big
Moments from Little Pictures (1924), a Keystone Kops parody starring Will
Rogers and Charlie Hall, which was directed by Roy Clements.
On such films as James Flood’s Why Girls Go Back Home (1926), Lloyd
Bacon’s The Heart of Maryland (1927), and Roy Del Ruth’s Ham and Eggs
at the Front (1927), Lederman proved himself an efficient taskmaster, who
pushed the cast and crew through the maximum number of setups per day.
Indeed, even after he became a full-fledged director, he would still work as
an AD on big-budget films like Roy Del Ruth’s Gold Diggers of Broadway
(1929), a film that now exists only in fragments, and was shot in early
two-strip Technicolor. As we will see, when his career as a director waned,
Lederman returned to his former position of assistant director, simply
because of his legendary efficiency on the set. Indeed, when Lederman
died, Variety singled out his work as an assistant director for praise rather
than his accomplishments as a feature filmmaker, observing that
Lederman was known particularly for trick scenes and chases, and had
directed the horse race in Frank Capra’s Broadway Bill [1934], which had one
of the most exciting windups ever lensed for a motion picture (the horse
wins, then drops dead). [This, as we will see, is a typically Ledermanian
touch.] While at Sennett, in addition to being an extra he was prop man for
Roscoe (Fatty) Arbuckle’s comedies, and was an assistant before becoming a
full-fledged director. Under contract later at Warner Bros., he made many of
the Rin-Tin-Tin pix, and in 1928 did underworld films for Metro.

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 A Cinema of Violence: The Films of D. Ross Lederman 

But Lederman’s true legacy is as a feature director, despite his impres-

sive work as an action specialist (reminiscent of another journeyman,
program director B. Reeves “Breezy” Eason). And that legacy started,
and later flourished, at Warner Bros., with brief detours along the way.
His first film as a director was a Rin-Tin-Tin silent, A Dog of the Regiment
(1927). Making the announcement of his promotion, Jack L. Warner
noted that
Lederman has been in the motion picture industry for twelve years . . . He
started as a field assistant and extra for D. W. Griffith. He has invented time
saving and efficient methods of checking up on production, the assistant
director’s manual which all our assistants and those on other lots are using to
advantage. Lederman has also aided on the constructive treatment of stories,
showing a knack for the camera angle side of the business. (“Ross Lederman
a Director,” n.pag.)

Lederman was, as Warner noted, a remarkably efficient craftsman.

During the early 1920s, he devised and adopted a new method of organ-
izing shots and sequences in motion pictures, creating the first “call
sheets,” which were then widely adopted within the industry. As an
unsourced article in Lederman’s scrapbook notes,
Ross felt that the old way of tabulating production schedules on graphic sheets
anywhere from a foot to a yard square was clumsy, and not super-efficient. So
he invented a manual which fits into a loose-leaf book and is alphabetically
arranged. All sets are arranged under their alphabetical heading, with props,
actors and necessary requisites for those sets grouped under the heading of the
set. By a system of cross markings in different colored inks, Ross can place his
finger on the set, date and hours of work for any member of the cast. He can
tell you what props will be needed for any set by consulting the set tab, and so
forth. This manual has been tried and proved by Warners, and Studio Manager
William Koenig has adopted it as the official Warner Bros. assistant director’s
handbook. The entire arrangement fits into any ordinary-sized coat pocket, so
it is Lederman’s manual with effective results. (Untitled article, n.pag.)

While his professional life was proceeding at a rapid clip, his personal life
was chaotic. In September 1920, Lederman married his first wife, who
became Marcella Lederman, but within a year, she was suing D. Ross
Lederman for divorce, alleging violence and cruelty. On 4 October 1922,
the Los Angeles Times noted that
Twice Mrs. Marcella Lederman forgave D. Ross Lederman, film director,
but the third time he is to be “out.” This, at least, is gathered from a divorce

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 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s

action filed yesterday by the young woman who declares that she has sued
her husband on two other occasions, but that each time she later forgave
him. According to the divorce complaint, which was prepared by Attorney
Isador Morris, Mr. Lederman beat his wife frequently and in other ways
was cruel. Mrs. Lederman sued for divorce. The husband, it is said, then
promised to reform if his wife would take him back. She agreed. The
second trial was no better, it is said, and Mrs. Lederman was forced to
again sue. But like the first experience, Mr. Lederman promised to be an
ideal husband if she would but take him into the family fold again. Now
she sues for the third time. (“Twice Mrs. Marcella Lederman Forgave D.
Ross Lederman,” n.pag.)

Yet, despite Lederman’s behavior, Marcella Lederman took him back

again. The reconciliation lasted for a time, and Marcella Lederman
eventually requested that her third divorce decree be set aside on
24 April 1923, despite the fact that Lederman, in the early days of
their marriage, “choked and struck her and professed a hearty aver-
sion for her woman friends” (“Wife Gets Her Decree Set Aside,”
n.pag.). Yet Lederman’s penchant for violence continued to manifest
itself, and on 28 February 1924, Lederman and a man named Otto
Meyer tangled on the set of a film that Lederman was working on as
an assistant director at the studios of Universal Pictures. Meyer filed
an assault charge, but dropped the case on 14 March 1924 (“Drops
Assault Charge,” n.pag.).
The couple’s reconciliation was short-lived, and soon Marcella
Lederman filed for divorce a fourth time, and then a fifth, and finally a
sixth. As the Los Angeles Times reported with some amusement,
Mrs. Marcella Brush Lederman has filed her spring suit for divorce from D.
Ross Lederman, film director. This is the sixth divorce action started by Mrs.
Lederman in Superior Court since her marriage, 22 Sep. 1920. Attaches of
the divorce filings section of the County Clerk’s office have come to regard
her institution of proceedings as a regular seasonal event, ranking alongside
the marching of the equinoxes and all that sort of thing as a marker of the
passage of time in its flight. (“Wife Files Spring Divorce Suit,” A2)

It seems that in his first wife, Lederman had met his match in tenacity;
Marcella Lederman was clearly determined that she would have her day
in court. On the seventh try, Marcella seems to have realized that life
with D. Ross Lederman would never be harmonious, and the Los Angeles
Times sent a reporter to cover her seventh, and ultimately successful, suit
for divorce. As the anonymous report noted dryly,

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 A Cinema of Violence: The Films of D. Ross Lederman 

Divorce litigation is keeping D. Ross Lederman, film director, poor, he told

Judge Summerfield yesterday when he was haled before the bar to tell why
he was in arrears in alimony payments of $25 a week to his wife, Marcella
Lederman, pending trial of her seventh suit for divorce. “I’ve paid for six of
these cases already,” Lederman complained. “I guess you can pay for this one,
too,” Judge Summerfield observed relentlessly, when Lederman admitted
his salary is $100 a week. “Get it cleared up by Friday—or, you know.” (“Her
Divorce Suits Keep Mate Poor,” n.pag.)

It was clear to both sides that the situation was untenable. At length,
Lederman’s temper was finally too much for Marcella Lederman, and
shortly after this seventh court appearance, the couple divorced. They
had no children.
In 1926, Lederman married again, this time to Frances Dee Warner
(no relation to the Warner Bros. family); Frances stayed with D. Ross
Lederman for 18 difficult years before leaving him in 1944. Their one
daughter, Joan, was born on 8 August 1927 (“ ‘Baby Stars’ Make Debut
in Hollywood,” n.pag.), and made her first public appearance in the
media on 1 September 1927, when, just 25 days old, she posed with
her mother for a photo shoot in the Los Angeles Times, ironically titled
“New Star for Papa to Direct.” Before marrying Lederman, Frances
Warner had a brief career in films, which was curtailed, according
to her daughter, by her mother’s excessive shyness. When she was 16,
Frances was taken to Paramount Studios by a friend, Ruth Miller, who
introduced her to Cecil B. DeMille. DeMille was immediately smitten
with Frances’ Madonna-like countenance. As his daughter Joan Neville
noted,
Ruth took my mother over to the studio for the first time, because she was
working there. Cecil B. DeMille saw her, and thought she was the most beau-
tiful creature he had ever seen. But my mother was terrified of the camera, so
DeMille used her hands to open letters in close-up shots. But she just couldn’t
handle it, and all she wanted to do was get married and be a homemaker.
Then she met my father and they just got married almost immediately. I think
they were married within six months. (21 October 2005)

Lederman’s kindness extended only to those whom he had known as

comrades in arms, in the most literal sense. When his friend Jack Wagner,
with whom Lederman had served in World War I in France, returned to
the United States and civilian life, suffering a streak of misfortune that
lasted from the Armistice until 1926, it was Lederman who moved Wagner
and his family to Los Angeles, and got his old pal a job at the Mack Sennett

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 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s

studios as a gag man (“Wrist Watch Given to Wartime ‘Buddy,’ ” n.pag.).

With those closer to home, Lederman never allowed emotions to temper
his behavior. The women in Lederman’s world were to be dominated,
exploited, or ignored, and men were friends only as long as they served his
needs. Lederman was ruthless in his personal affairs, as well as in his busi-
ness dealings. Working for Jack Warner, Darryl F. Zanuck (then Warner
Bros. head of production) and other studio moguls made Lederman
tough, unyielding, unforgiving. Later, he would work for Harry Cohn at
Columbia, perhaps the most pugnacious of the studio bosses, efficiently
grinding out the violent action films that had become his trademark.
But the brutality that informed Lederman’s worldview was already
firmly shaped by 1926; perhaps by his father’s absence, or his mother’s
theatrical affection for soldiers going off to war, or other factors that
remain, to this day, a mystery. What we do know is that Lederman,
already a veteran at 33, was more than ready to bring his violent vision to
the screen, which was perhaps the only place where he truly felt that he
had some measure of control. Pushing his actors and technicians relent-
lessly through the grueling schedule of a ten-day picture, Lederman had
little time to worry about home life, or the problems and attachments it
presented. Indeed, his daughter, who was more or less banned from the
set when Lederman worked at Warner Bros. in the 1940s, bicycled over
to the lot one day anyway, and was struck by the calmness and efficiency
with which Lederman put his crew through their paces. “There was no
shouting,” she recalled. That was for home.
On 14 July 1927, Lederman received a telegram from Darryl F. Zanuck,
chief of production at Warner’s, regarding his first directorial assign-
ment. It said simply
Mr. Ross Lederman
Mr. Charles Condon: [producer]
Starting date on “A DOG OF THE REGIMENT” is
29 Aug. without fail.
D. F. Zanuck.
(D. Ross Lederman papers)

Ten days later, the production of the silent film was finished; it was cut
and previewed, and Lederman, always at home with action films, scored
his first success at the box office. For quite awhile thereafter, Lederman
was tagged as an “animal” director, as well as a reliable technician who
got the most out of his camera setups, and kept a firm hand on the
directorial reins. At 50 minutes, A Dog of the Regiment was a Saturday

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 A Cinema of Violence: The Films of D. Ross Lederman 

afternoon children’s film, but Lederman wrings every ounce of emotion

and pathos from his programmatic material; perhaps, in part, because
the film has a World War I setting, as Rin-Tin-Tin bravely rescues an
aviator shot down behind German lines. Rinty of the Desert (1928) found
the eponymous canine once again rescuing various cast members from
the perils of snake pits and sandstorms; at 60 minutes, the film was only
slightly more ambitious than Lederman’s debut.
Race for Life (1928), a brief 48-minute “featurette,” teamed Rin-Tin-
Tin with a young boy, Danny O’Shea (played by Bobby Gordon), who
is menaced by kidnappers. Then, in odd career shift, and certainly one
that could not have endeared him to Warner Bros., Lederman moved
to MGM to direct Shadows of the Night (1928), a silent 70-minute
feature starring Flash, a “wonder dog” with more than a passing
similarity to Rin-Tin-Tin. Perhaps predictably, Flash never caught
on as a screen attraction, and Lederman was soon back at Warner’s,
directing Rin-Tin-Tin in the 1929 silent film The Million Dollar Collar,
a 61-minute action film in which Rinty runs afoul of a gang of jewel
thieves.
In 1930, Lederman put Rin-Tin-Tin through his paces in his first
sound film, The Man Hunter, a 60-minute programmer ostensibly set in
Africa, with John Loder as the male lead. The film did not do as well
as the earlier Rin-Tin-Tin films, and Lederman temporarily departed
Warner Bros. for a brief stint at Columbia, directing the Buck Jones
Westerns Branded, The Range Feud, and The Texas Rangers (all 1931). At
59 minutes, Branded is simultaneously frantic and yet ultimately predict-
able, but Lederman had proven that he could do a competent Western
on a minimal budget, while The Range Feud features a young John Wayne
in an early starring role, to good effect, and The Texas Ranger is a modest,
yet effective long entry in the long Buck Jones series.
This was all it took to convince Nat Levine, the head of the minor
studio Mascot Pictures, to hire Lederman to single-handedly direct
The Phantom of the West (shot in 1930, released in 1931), a ten-chapter
serial starring the athletic but rather wooden Tom Tyler as Jim Lester, a
Western action hero out to clear an innocent man from a murder charge.
The real villain is known only as The Phantom, and successfully eludes
Tyler’s detection until the serial’s last chapter, to the surprise of absolutely
no one. Mascot was perhaps the cheapest studio in Hollywood, and The
Phantom of the West is threadbare in every respect. Yet directing a serial
with a running time of nearly three hours in a matter of weeks was still

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a significant logistical challenge. As for Lederman’s direction, historian

Jon Tuska notes that
Lederman was something of an oddity. His principal concerns, throughout
his career, even throughout his many years at Columbia, remained budget
cutting for its own sake (something which, however, endeared him to
producers and production supervisors), getting actors to do their jobs them-
selves with only minimal interference, and, most of all, a concern for his own
personal income. (24)

There is a good deal of truth in these remarks, but at Mascot, the sched-
ules were so tight, and the budgets so minuscule, that directors were
often forced to do 70 to 80 setups a day. Faced with such a schedule, it
is remarkable that The Phantom of the West is as good as it is, and signifi-
cantly, Lederman never again returned to work for Mascot.
A succession of “B” Westerns at Columbia followed Lederman’s stint
at Mascot, including Two-Fisted Law, another Tim McCoy vehicle; Texas
Cyclone with McCoy and John Wayne; Ridin’ for Justice, a Buck Jones
entry; The Fighting Marshall and Daring Dangers, both with Tim McCoy;
McKenna of the Mounted, a Buck Jones programmer with a Canadian
Mounted Police backdrop; High Speed, in which Tim McCoy tackled
a modern drama, as a race car driver who becomes a father figure to
a young, crippled boy named Buddy (played by a pre-MGM Mickey
Rooney) when Buddy’s father is killed in a speedway crash; End of the
Trail, an atypically ambitious McCoy project shot on location at White
River near the town of Landers, Wyoming, and a film that spoke plain-
tively of the plight of Native Americans when most program Westerns
dispensed with plot, much less social commentary, in favor of a series
of violent, often incoherent action sequences; and The Riding Tornado, a
lesser McCoy effort with copious amounts of stock footage.
Astoundingly, all of these films were made in 1932. Lederman was still
finding himself as a director, and his camera setups are often merely func-
tional, but in End of the Trail, particularly, he creates both a distinctive
narrative and an aggressive pictorial style, which would reach its zenith
a decade later at Warner Bros. Other films followed in predictably rapid
fashion. Silent Men (1933) was another Tim McCoy “shoot-em-up,” and
perhaps the least impressive of Lederman’s many Westerns, with a shoot-
ing schedule of a mere six days, and a budget of only $12,000, a figure
that would be risible today, even for a 58-minute program picture. More
interesting, and also indicative of Lederman’s future work, was Soldiers of
the Storm (1933), a smuggling drama with an aviation backdrop, starring

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 A Cinema of Violence: The Films of D. Ross Lederman 

Regis Toomey, one of Hollywood’s most prolific character actors, in a

rare leading role. As columnist Louella Parsons noted in a remarkable
favorable notice, the film itself was based on actual events. As Parsons
breathlessly told her readers on 17 June 1932, when the film was still in
production,
Impressive, spectacular and exciting (three good, but overworked adjectives)
is the plan of Columbia to film Soldiers of the Storm. Perhaps I should say
original, for, so far as I know, this is the first time the activities of the Red
Cross during the Corpus Christi flood have been filmed . . . Ross Lederman in
directing will have the aid and cooperation of the Red Cross and the border
patrol air force. And from all accounts it will be a very special Columbia
special. (Parsons, n.pag.)

By the time the film was released, much of the “true life” material had
been jettisoned in favor of conventional melodrama, but Lederman kept
the film rolling at a typically fast clip. Speed Demon (1933), a racing boat
film, also foreshadows Lederman’s later work for Warner’s, with a succes-
sion of fights and chase sequences that follow one another in a furious
pace. Mark It Paid (1933) recycles much the same territory, speedboat
racing, with a different cast, yet achieves the same kinetic intensity. State
Trooper (1933) again stars Regis Toomey in a surprisingly brutal crime
drama, while The Whirlwind (1933) finds Lederman back in the saddle
with Tim McCoy, in an indifferent and hastily produced Western of
little originality or distinction. Rusty Rides Alone, Lederman’s final 1933
entry, is another unexceptional Western. In addition, Lederman surrep-
titiously journeyed to Warner Bros., and worked with Kay Francis on
Robert Florey’s maternal melodrama The House on 56th Street (1933) as an
uncredited second unit director, “punching up” Florey’s somewhat stolid
pacing at the studio’s request.
In 1934, Lederman was finally allowed to move definitively outside
the Western genre, with Crime of Helen Stanley, a murder mystery in
Columbia’s “Inspector Trent” series, starring the utilitarian Ralph
Bellamy as the intrepid detective. The film is set in a film studio, elimi-
nating the use of costly sets and props (the film, like other programmers
of the 1930s and 1940s, was shot on “leftover” sets from more ambitious
productions), and features Lederman’s now familiar breathless pacing
with narrative compressed to an absolute minimum. Hell Bent for Love
(1934) is another state trooper crime procedurally with Tim McCoy in
another contemporary role, while A Man’s Game (1934) features McCoy
and Ward Bond as resolutely masculine firefighters, and incorporates

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 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s

healthy chunks of stock newsreel footage of actual blazes for added

verisimilitude. Beyond the Law (1934) found McCoy as a Depression-era
railroad detective, and The Hollywood Reporter singled out the film for
special praise in a review dated 30 June 1934. Noted the Reporter’s anony-
mous trade critic,
Director Lederman has avoided anything touching upon the flamboyant in
his handling of the story. He develops situations naturally, then allows them
to stand upon their own feet. The result is an action picture in the very best of
taste. (“Direction Helps Good Story and Cast,” n.pag.)

Girl in Danger (1934) was the final entry in Columbia’s “Inspector Trent”
series, with Ralph Bellamy once again playing the title role. Without
breaking stride, Lederman moved to Warner Bros. for Murder in the
Clouds (1934), a typically fast-paced crime thriller with another aviation-
based narrative. Warner’s contract players Lyle Talbot, Ann Dvorak, and
Henry O’Neill are top billed in this surprisingly effective action film,
which benefited from spectacular aerial footage that was subsequently
used by the studio in two other productions. The Case of the Missing
Men (1934) found Lederman back at Columbia, directing the reluctant
program leading man Roger Pryor opposite Joan Perry, who would soon
retire from acting to marry Columbia’s vitriolic president, Harry Cohn.
The year 1935 brought forth a grab-bag of films from the conscientious
multigenre filmmaker, including the maternal melodrama Dinky, with
Jackie Cooper and Mary Astor; Red Hot Times, yet another racing film
with Lyle Talbot and Mary Astor in the leading roles; and Too Tough to
Kill, a typically brutal Lederman project concerning the construction of a
giant tunnel, with the reliable Victor Jory in the no-nonsense leading role.
But with only three films to his credit in 1935, it was clear that Lederman
was slowing down his torrid pace of production, as well as spending
more time on each film, searching for new and inventive camera angles,
more effective montage strategies, and working with actors in a more
deliberate, even intimate manner. His films were nevertheless still frankly
program pictures; 1936 saw the production of Alibi for Murder, a crime
thriller set in a radio station in the “locked room” genre, yet concluding
with a manic car chase, a fixture in many of Lederman’s films since his
days as an extra and stunt arranger for the Keystone Kops.
Hell Ship Morgan (1936) is a “Man-against-the-Sea” drama, with Ann
Sothern, George Bancroft, and Victor Jory in the leading roles. In the
film’s surprisingly violent conclusion, sea captain Morgan (Bancroft)

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 A Cinema of Violence: The Films of D. Ross Lederman 

is permanently paralyzed when he tries to save his ship’s crew during

a hurricane. Feeling that he will never be able to marry his sweetheart,
Mary (Sothern), because of his paralysis, Morgan conveniently commits
suicide, so that Mary and Jim (Jory), Morgan’s first mate, can consum-
mate their unspoken desire for each other. At 64 minutes, the film’s
action is unrelenting, but Lederman proved he could also handle domes-
tic comedy with equal deftness in Come Closer, Folks (1936), a charming
comedy revolving around aggressive street-corner salesman Kim Keene
(James Dunn), who falls in love with Peggy Woods (Marian Marsh),
and ultimately saves her father, Elmer’s (Gene Lockhart), department
store from bankruptcy. Pride of the Marines (1936) starred tough-as-nails
Charles Bickford as a Marine who turns protector for a young orphan
boy played by Bill Burrud, who would go on in the 1960s to great fame as
a television “nature guide” in the early 1950s.
All through the late 1930s, Lederman kept cracking out genre films
at a furious pace, from the gunfights of Moonlight on the Prairie (1936),
to the courtroom drama The Final Hour (1936), the loan shark drama I
Promise to Pay (1937), and the racing/crime film The Frame Up (1937).
Interestingly, many of Lederman’s films of this period are genre “hot-
wire” projects, melding equal parts of romance, action, suspense, and
violence to create an atmosphere of perpetual unease, in which the
protagonists are constantly imperiled, and situations are introduced
only to be radically revised by the twist of the narrative moments later.
In Lederman’s world, no one is to be trusted, as demonstrated in the
surprisingly downbeat A Dangerous Adventure, in which young Linda
Gale (Rosalina Keith) inherits a steel mill, and joins forces with Tim
Sawyer (Don Terry) to keep it operating smoothly. Predictably, a group
of thugs engage in a campaign of sabotage that almost forces the plant
to close, until Linda and Tim gain the penultimate upper hand in the
film’s final moments.
For most of the film’s brief 58-minute running time, Linda Gale’s even-
tual victory is anything but certain; indeed, the obstacles placed in her
path keep mounting with alarming alacrity. In A Dangerous Adventure,
one gets the distinct impression that the film’s heterotopic ending is
simply tacked on to appease both the production code and contempo-
rary audiences to say nothing of the studio’s front office. The social land-
scape of A Dangerous Adventure is bleak indeed, as if society itself was
constantly under attack. In the same manner, hockey became The Game
That Kills in Lederman’s 1937 film of that name, in which professional

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 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s

hockey is revealed as both corrupt and unrelentingly vicious, the domain

of hoodlums and strong-arm men.
Tarzan’s Revenge (1938) was a departure for Lederman, working for the
first time in a long-established and prestigious series, but the film’s star,
Glenn Morris, a former Olympic athlete from the 1936 games (who was
lionized by Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl in her documentary of the
Olympics, the 1938 two-part feature film Olympia), showed little of the
charisma on screen in a fictional role that he had displayed in real life
in Olympia, and Tarzan’s Revenge failed at the box office. Lederman’s next
effort, Juvenile Court (1938), is an obvious attempt to copy the success of
the Dead End Kids, with a young Rita Hayworth as the film’s nominal
star; The Little Adventuress (1938) is another horse racing drama aimed at
juvenile, matinee audiences.
Lederman walks through both films with practiced assurance, but his
own worldview is more clearly aligned with Adventure in Sahara (1938),
a brutal legionnaire drama starring Paul Kelly, Lorna Gray, and iconic
heavy Marc Lawrence. Lederman rounded out the 1930s at Columbia
with a number of additional genre entries such as the program Western
Racketeers of the Range (1939); the “B” girl drama Glamour for Sale (1940);
another Dead End Kids clone, Military Academy (1940), and then returned
to his first studio, Warner Bros., where, starting in 1941, he would make
perhaps the most significantly personal films of his career—films that
display an almost astonishing disregard of generic conventions, creat-
ing a universe that is Lederman’s alone. His first film for Warner’s, The
Body Disappears (1941), was a conventional murder mystery (although
it boasted the considerable talents of Jane Wyman, Edward Everett
Horton, and Lederman regular Wade Boteler), but with Strange Alibi
(1941), Arthur Kennedy’s first starring feature film, Lederman acceler-
ated his already frenzied narrative style to fever pitch, creating a series
of dazzling films that celebrate speed, motion, and the mechanics of
random narrative causality.
In Strange Alibi, Kennedy plays the role of Joe Geary, an honest cop
who goes undercover to smash a police corruption ring that is crippling
the city. Staging a “fight” with his superior, Chief Sprague (Jonathan
Hale), Geary is ostensibly kicked off the force in disgrace, and soon
hooks up with the hoodlum element in the city, as a formerly good
cop who has “gotten wise” to himself. In short order, he discovers that
Captain Reddick (Cliff Clark) and Lt. Pagle (Stanley Andrews) are
behind the crime wave that plagues the city, and 63 minutes later brings

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 A Cinema of Violence: The Films of D. Ross Lederman 

the miscreants to justice. But this brief synopsis gives no real sense of the
frenzied, fatalistic pace the film almost immediately adopts. The open-
ing shot shows a plane in midair, which lands a few moments later. The
passengers rapidly deplane, including retired gambling boss King Carney
(Herbert Rawlinson), who has been living in Florida after narrowly
escaping execution at the hands of his underworld competitors. He has
returned to the city to cooperate with Chief Sprague in cleaning up the
rackets, and is set to testify before the Grand Jury the next morning. In a
brief conversation with two reporters at the airport, Carney outlines his
plan of action, and then catches a cab to the police station.
In a typically Ledermanian touch, Carney is cut down in the taxi in
a hail of machine gun bullets literally moments later, and the report-
ers, who have witnessed his murder, immediately phone the story in to
their papers. Almost immediately, the identity of the killer, Louie Butler
(Butler is never seen in the film, and makes his only “appearance” later as
an off-screen, heavily shadowed corpse), is made known, and Lederman
presents a frenzied montage of the police rounding up suspects, smash-
ing into gambling clubs and bars, until they arrest the hapless Butler as
one of a mob of miscreants (through the judicious use of stock footage).
Butler is taken into police custody, but is moved from the mail jail to an
offsite holding cell for the sake of “security.”
The next morning, Chief Sprague arrives at the police headquarters to
question Butler, only to discover that he has ostensibly committed suicide
in his holding cell, using his belt to hang himself. Sprague immediately
realizes that the supposed “suicide” is actually murder, and summons
his entire staff to his office to reprimand them for allowing the murder
to take place. It is at this juncture that Sprague and Geary stage their
premeditated altercation, and Geary is unceremoniously thrown off the
force. Compressing time in a few atmospheric shots, Lederman moves
to the evening of the next day, as Geary and Sprague plot their campaign
against the underworld. Geary agrees to keep his masquerade a secret,
even from his fiancée, Alice Devlin (Joan Perry).
Lederman pushes the plot forward to the ironically named Safe
Anchorage Café, a water front gambling joint of singular disrepute,
presided over by Katie (the perennially hardboiled Florence Bates, who
was a lawyer in Texas before turning to acting as a profession), an impos-
ing matriarch who has nevertheless long ago decided to cooperate with
the city’s criminal elite. Geary deftly insinuates himself into the gang as
a “bag man,” making the rounds to collect the mob’s illicit winnings. To

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 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s

further ingratiate himself with his new companions, Geary strong arms a
minor underworld figure, “Fido” Durkin (Ben Weldon), into paying off a
longstanding debt to the mob. Impressed, his handlers take him straight
to the top of the criminal pyramid, while his fiancée, accompanied by
honest cop Captain Allen (Wade Boteler), watches Geary’s seeming
descent into crime with disgust.
The mysterious “A. E. Laughlin,” the supposed head of the syndicate,
which operates under the nebulous name “Consolidated Enterprises,”
turns out to be a “straw man” dreamed up by Pagle and Reddick as a
front for the illicit enterprises. Geary is shocked to discover that his
police force is so thoroughly corrupt, and using tubercular thug Benny
McKaye (Joe Downing) as a front, races to Chief Sprague’s apartment to
tell him the news. But, unsurprisingly, Pagle is still suspicious of Geary’s
recent “conversion” to crime, and trails Geary and McKaye to Sprague’s
clandestine rooms. Overhearing their conversation, Pagle bursts in and
fatally shoots Sprague, framing Geary for the murder. Benny McKaye,
who has witnessed the murder, escapes through a window. With Sprague
dead, Geary has no alibi, and Pagle and Reddick easily railroad him
into prison, where the sadistic warden, Monson (Howard Da Silva in a
brutally convincing performance), torments Geary on a nonstop basis,
throwing him into the “hole” for extended stretches of time on the vagu-
est of pretexts.
Big Dog (Dick Rich) and Durkin are now inmates in the penitentiary
along with Geary, and do their best to kill him at every possible oppor-
tunity. Monson is so universally hated by the cons that, one day on the
rock pile, a group of inmates contrive to drop a boulder on Monson with
a steam shovel. The attempt fails, but Monson is wounded, and Geary
and his one friend in the prison, Tex Alexander (John Ridgely), escape
in an ambulance in the confusion. Big Dog is furious that Geary might
escape before he can kill him, and jumps on the running board of the
fleeing ambulance in a last ditch attempt to murder Geary, but without
success; Big Dog is cut down in yet another burst of machine gun bullets
from the prison guards.
Tex and Geary make good their escape, but discover that Benny
McKaye, the one witness to the murder of Chief Sprague, has died of
consumption. In a desperate, last ditch scheme, Geary kidnaps the
governor of the state, Phelps (Charles Trowbridge), and forces him to
phone Reddick and Pagle, telling them that Benny McKaye is alive,
and has fingered them for Chief Sprague’s murder. Geary parks his car

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 A Cinema of Violence: The Films of D. Ross Lederman 

across the street from Governor Phelps’ apartment with Benny McKaye’s
corpse in the driver’s seat, and watches with Phelps as Reddick and Pagle
“murder” Benny in yet another spectacularly violent drive-by shooting.
Convinced of Geary’s innocence, the governor brings in the state police
to arrest Reddick and Pagle, and clear Geary of Sprague’s murder. Geary,
completely exhausted from the ordeal, falls asleep on the governor’s
couch, utterly drained by his narrow descent into crime.
Even this brief synopsis of the film’s convoluted and frenzied narra-
tive does little to convey the ferocity with which Strange Alibi is directed.
Lederman’s camera coverage is always proactive, searching for the best
possible angle for each sequence, each shot, moving with utter assurance
in a series of fluid dollies through “Consolidated Enterprises” corrupt
domain. “Cookies” are used liberally to give each setup added punch and
atmosphere, and whenever possible, Lederman used a series of swiftly
moving montage sequences to compress time and narrative exposition.
Da Silva’s Monson is a memorably despicable creation, prowling through
the prison yard, nightstick at the ready, a sneer firmly etched on his
brutal visage, as he clubs into submission longtime prisoners who can no
longer defend themselves from his viciousness with undisguised glee.
Continually referring to Geary as “the defective detective,” Monson
seizes upon any minor infraction of the prison rules to hurl Geary into
solitary confinement. Lederman deftly conveys the depths of Geary’s
desolation and anger in the “hole” in an economical nine-shot montage
that begins with Geary being pushed into the darkened cell, then refus-
ing food as the days pass by, at length accepting bread and water rather
than starving, and ending with a haunting close-up of Geary’s eyes, as
he realizes that his plight is hopeless. As another example of directorial
economy, when Tex and Geary escape from prison in the ambulance,
Lederman uses footage from Lloyd Bacon’s San Quentin (1937) to heighten
the tempo of the chase sequence, forcing the getaway car to cross the
tracks of a speeding locomotive not once, but twice. The second time, the
car smashes into the speeding train and rolls into a ditch. Tex is killed,
but Geary escapes by running after the train, and jumping on a boxcar.
Throughout the film, all authority is shown as worthless, corrupt,
or inefficient; no one believes Geary’s protestations of innocence at his
trial for Sprague’s death, and the prosecutor is too anxious to convict
Geary to entertain the possibility that anyone else is responsible for the
crime. Typically for Lederman, Geary’s fiancée—Alice Devlin—is an
entirely one-dimensional character, who exists within the film merely

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 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s

to assure Geary that “I’ll be waiting” when he gets out of prison, which
without any outside help isn’t likely. The only other female character of
consequence, Katie, is an exquisitely corrupt member of the “Laughlin”
mob, and though she eventually switches allegiances to help Geary in
his fight to clear his name, she remains for sale to the highest bidder for
most of the film’s brief duration. Shot with vibrant intensity by the gifted
veteran Allen G. Siegler, and tightly edited by Frank Magee, Strange Alibi
is a curiously compelling film, which resonates in the memory long after
the last violent scene has faded from the screen.
Lederman’s 1942 Escape from Crime is even more surreal, violent, and
hard to classify. In the film’s first scene, Red O’Hara (Richard Travis) is
stuck in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, but despairs of ever getting
out. In the next scene, one of his prison buddies rushes to tell Red that
he’s been paroled, effective immediately, for no apparent reason. Thirty
seconds later, Red is driving away from the prison with his erstwhile
criminal associate, Slim Dugan (Rex Williams), exulting in his newfound
freedom. Not 30 seconds after that, Red is demanding that Slim “hand
over his rod,” so that Red can murder his wife, Molly O’Hara (Julie
Bishop), for being unfaithful. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” Slim
laconically intones, but of course, Red has no idea what he’s doing; he’s
simply a pawn in the film’s bizarre and often contradictory narrative,
pursuing one objective in one shot, only to change his mind in the next.
Abruptly convinced of Molly’s fidelity by the presence of a redheaded
young boy whom Molly claims is his child, Red abandons his plans to
murder her (“Gee, that’s swell!” Slim comments, upon hearing Red’s
change of heart), and decides to pursue a job as a newspaper cameraman.
At this point, the film becomes a compressed remake of Lloyd Bacon’s
James Cagney vehicle, Picture Snatcher (1933), as Red claws his way to the
top of the tabloid news photographer’s trade. Wherever Red goes, things
happen. His first big break occurs when his former associates, including
Slim, stick up a bank while Red is passing by, his Speed Graphic camera
at the ready. Convincing Cornell (Frank Wilcox), the editor of a sleazy
daily, to hire him despite his prison record on the strength of his exclu-
sive photos of the holdup, Red plunges into a maelstrom of pictorial
violence. Planes crash at air shows, cars are wrecked in automobile races,
fires consume entire tenement blocks, and Red is always on the scene,
dutifully recording it all for posterity.
At length, however, the senior editor of the newspaper, Reardon
(Charles Wilson), presents Red with an assignment that is too tough for

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 A Cinema of Violence: The Films of D. Ross Lederman 

even Red to consider: photographing the execution of Red’s pal Slim in

the electric chair, for his part in the robbery that got Red his first break
with the paper. Red is understandably reluctant to accept the assign-
ment, which is in direct violation of prison rules, and will result in the
revocation of his parole. But, as always, in D. Ross Lederman’s world,
money is the ultimate arbiter of all social intercourse, and Red agrees to
clandestinely photograph the execution for a fee of $1,000. (The incident
itself is based on the true life story of the execution of Ruth Snyder, who
was put to death in the electric chair for murder on 12 January 1928; The
New York Daily News sent a photographer to cover the execution, and
then ran the photo as a full-page spread on the front page of the morn-
ing editions, selling an extra 750,000 copies of the issue because of the
grisly photograph.) Red arrives at the prison at the appointed hour, and
cheerfully gives Slim a “thumbs up” as he trudges to the chair, then snaps
a picture of Slim’s death, unobserved by the other reporters.
As in The Picture Snatcher, Red drops the camera on his way out of
the prison, and is thus unmasked by his rival news hounds as a “rogue
photographer.” Though the other reporters give chase, Red eludes them,
and successfully collects his bonus. However, as Red had predicted, his
parole officer, Lt. Biff Malone (Wade Boteler again; Boteler was a fixture
in numerous Lederman films), takes a dim view of Red’s perfidy, and
arranges to have him returned to prison as a parole violator. Yet, as
chance would have it, on the way back to the prison, Red and Biff stum-
ble upon the hideout of Dude Merrill (Paul Fix), mastermind of the gang
that pulled the fateful bank job. Convincing Biff to let him capture Dude
and his associates, Red in a matter of seconds infiltrates Dude’s gang, and
in a remarkably violent machine gun battle in which half the city’s police
participate, brings Dude to justice, assures Biff ’s promotion to captaincy,
captures another photographic “exclusive” for his newspaper, and by the
order of the governor, is issued a full pardon for any and all past criminal
offenses.
One is astonished at the audacity of the film’s mise en scène, which is
simultaneously frenzied and improbable. At the same time, it isn’t hard
to see that although Lederman stages the entire project with verve and
economy, his tongue is firmly planted in his cheek. In the final shootout
at Dude’s apartment, the police are picking off his gunsels at a furious
pace, but Dude is convinced that one of his underlings, a crack shot,
can still help them out of their predicament. In the next shot, we see the
hapless gunman mowed down in a withering barrage of bullets. “Well,

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 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s

I guess he won’t be much help,” Dude deadpans, and in the ensuing

mayhem, the gunman’s death is quickly shuffled into the background.
This sort of grim efficiency highlights the most kinetic and outrageous
of Lederman’s many films, but in Strange Alibi and Escape from Crime,
his mordantly nihilistic vision reaches a peculiar apotheosis. Lederman
seems to realize that his view of the world is skewed, to say the least,
and he clearly delights in defying generic conventions as convenience or
necessity dictated.
Aside from the fact that Lederman’s films for Warner Bros. in the
1940s were all constructed from recycled scripts, existing sets, contract
players, and preexisting music scores, the stark economy of Lederman’s
production methods placed him firmly under the radar of studio inter-
ference. If Lederman was directing a film, Warner’s could be assured
that it would come in on time and probably under budget; why bother
him, since he clearly knew exactly what he was doing? Thus, Lederman
functioned virtually without studio interference at Warner’s during the
early 1940s, even though Jack Warner had declared that the studio would
no longer produce “B” films after 4 October 1941. Indeed, Warner even
staged a mock funeral for the “B” film, with contract players Humphrey
Bogart and Ann Sheridan in attendance, complete with a gravesite and a
tombstone, upon which was inscribed
HERE LIES A
“B”
----------
THE “Bs” ARE DEAD
AND HAVE NO MOURNER.
“THEIR DAY IS PASSED,”
SAYS J. L. WARNER.
----------
DIED
OCTOBER 4, 1941
(Sperber and Lax, photograph facing 181)

Undeterred by this announcement, Lederman kept churning out program

films until 1944, including the comedy Passage from Hong Kong (1941);
the bizarre murder mystery Shadow on the Stairs (1941, codirected with
Lumsden Hare), in which the entire narrative and its protagonists are
revealed to be the figments of a playwright’s imagination in the last two
minutes of the film; Across the Sierras (1941), a William “Wild Bill” Elliot
Western Lederman made on loan-out to Columbia; the family drama

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 A Cinema of Violence: The Films of D. Ross Lederman 

Father’s Son (1941), based on a story by Penrod author Booth Tarkington,

featuring the reliable character actors John Litel and Frieda Inescourt;
Busses Road (1942), a violent action thriller involving Axis spies, and
a bus rigged to explode, with passengers still inside, at a vital oil field;
Bullet Scars (1942), a typically vicious crime thriller with Howard Da
Silva as Frank Dillon, a psychopathic gangster with a Napoleon complex;
I Was Framed (1942), of which the title tells all (a reporter is framed by
crooked politicians); The Gorilla Man (1942), a World War II espionage
thriller with distinctly sadistic overtones in which a group of Nazis pose
as psychiatrists, tricking downed commando Captain Craig Killian (John
Loder) into believing that he has become a dangerous psychopath; Find
the Blackmailer (1943), a routine comedy crime film with character actor
Jerome Cowan in a rare leading role; Adventure in Iraq (1943), perhaps
Lederman’s best known film, no doubt due to its title, and one of the
few available on DVD, in which a group of Allied soldiers crash-land in
the Iraqi desert, and are captured by the smooth-talking sheik Ahmid
Bel Nor (Paul Cavanagh), who intends to sacrifice them to appease his
bloodthirsty, “devil worshipping” constituents; and The Last Ride (1944),
Warner’s final program picture, in which wartime rubber shortages
lead to the illicit manufacture of substandard automobile tires, and
predictably for Lederman, violent death. All of these films tell us much
about 1940s American society at its most unvarnished; filled with fear,
desperation, and a fatalistic view of both people and events not shared
by Warner’s glossier productions, Lederman’s brief 1940s program films
are precisely geared to their intended target audience, a wartime public
weary of conflict, afraid of the disruptions in society that it caused, and
deeply insecure about the future of the American political and social
system. But now, his tenure at Warner Bros. was at an end.
Cut loose from Warner Bros. after nearly two decades of continuous
employment (at Warner’s, Columbia, and, in his early days, Mascot,
which by 1944 had been absorbed into the mini-major, Republic Studios),
Lederman found himself adrift. He had so effectively carried out a niche
for himself as a director of 60-minute features that no one would give
him a shot at an “A” feature. In desperation, Lederman made one film
for Monogram Pictures—one of the most threadbare of the Poverty Row
studios—the weak slapstick comedy Three of a Kind (1944), a distinct
step down from Warner’s, Columbia, or even Republic. Fortunately for
Lederman, even as his home life disintegrated—after years of abuse,
his second wife, Frances, left him to start a new life elsewhere—Harry

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 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s

Cohn, the head of Columbia Pictures, an equally abrasive and exploita-

tive personality, suddenly hired Lederman to direct program films for
Columbia, though both men knew that the days of the double-bill, and
thus the need for a second feature, were numbered.
Lederman had been like a mad alchemist in his final days at Warner’s,
grafting together sections of screenplays from one film, and then
another, incorporating stock footage with near Vertovian abandon,
shifting from comedy to tragedy in a matter of seconds, borrowing stock
music scores from other Warner Bros. films to underscore his violent
visuals, until his final, frenzied films for that studio became almost a
genre unto themselves—the violent, chaotic, unmistakably singular
works of a genre artist in overdrive, akin to Tex Avery’s equally anarchic
theatrical cartoons for MGM during the same period, the mid-1940s.
At Columbia, the intensity of Lederman’s manic vision slackened, and
his projects became more routine, even exhausted. The Racket Man’s
(1944) sole distinction is that it offered a very young Shelley Winters an
early role. Out of the Depths (1946) is a potentially interesting postwar
riff on Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat (1946), with four men stranded in a
lifeboat in the Pacific recounting their wartime experiences. But the film
soon degenerates into a conventional military drama, and Lederman’s
handling of such an intimate scenario is uneven, even detached.
The Phantom Thief (1946) is one of the final entries in the long-running
Boston Blackie series, which effectively typecast Chester Morris for life
as the titular debonair amateur detective. Dangerous Business (1946) is
another routine crime thriller, while The Notorious Lone Wolf (1946) is an
ill-advised attempt to regenerate a series that had expired several years
earlier, with Gerald Mohr replacing the original “Lone Wolf ” character,
Michael Lanyard, who had previously been played by Warren William.
Key Witness (1947) is another murder mystery, which seems singularly
lacking in drive or interest; The Lone Wolf in Mexico (1947) finds Michael
Lanyard (Gerald Mohr again) involved with diamond smugglers in a
surprisingly cut-rate production, transparently filmed on the Columbia
back lot, with only minimal stock footage interspersed to give the project
a fleeting air of authenticity.
The Return of the Whistler (1948) is an even sadder proposition; under
the inspired direction of William Castle and Lew Landers, the earlier
entries in the Whistler series had been one of Columbia’s most intrigu-
ing series of “twist ending” mysteries, each starring character actor
Richard Dix, portraying an entirely different character in each film.

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 A Cinema of Violence: The Films of D. Ross Lederman 

The Whistler himself was seen solely as a shadow, offering a mordant

voiceover as the omniscient narrator of the series. Lederman’s lack of
involvement in The Return of the Whistler is clear from the outset, and for
good reason; essentially, he was finishing up a string of tired “franchise”
films at Columbia (the Boston Blackie, Lone Wolf, and Whistler series)
when all the original participants had abandoned them. With nothing
new at stake, Lederman’s interest in these films is minimal, and one gets
a deep sense of dissatisfaction viewing Lederman’s late Columbia films,
as if Lederman was, at long last, growing tired of the demands of the
Hollywood system.
It was now clear, if it had even been in doubt, that Lederman would
never break through to “A” status; his friend Roy Del Ruth had long been
established as a reliable front-rank director, but Lederman had labored
too long in the “B” trenches. Typecast solely as an action director, with
little money set aside for retirement, Lederman had no choice but to
soldier on, even as the studio system that had initially nurtured him
seemed to vanish into thin air. At 54, Lederman was too old to adapt
to the changing face of the industry, and worn out from years as a low-
paid contract director. In addition, his violent and irascible manner had
alienated many of those who might have helped him, and as the 1950s
dawned, D. Ross Lederman found himself a lonely, embittered man,
without a family or a continuing career, a relic from a bygone era.
Significantly, Lederman’s personal scrapbook during this period
trails off drastically; although he proudly posted reviews and “column
mentions” of his 1930s and early 1940s films in his album of mementos, by
the late 1940s there is literally nothing—just a big gap, even as he worked
harder than he had in the 1930s, on less promising material, simply to
put food on the table. One of Lederman’s final features, the abysmal
Military Academy with That Tenth Avenue Gang (1950), was an impover-
ished and ill-advised attempt to capitalize on the success of Monogram’s
endlessly popular Bowery Boys comedy series, with Stanley Clements in
the leading role of “Stash.” (Ironically, when Leo Gorcey, leader of the
Bowery Boys, quit that series in a salary dispute in 1956, Clements would
be recruited by Monogram to star in the final seven Bowery Boys films,
using the same character name as he does in Lederman’s film, Stash [see
Dixon, 2005, 1–8]).
Lederman listlessly codirected one last feature for Warner Bros., The
Tanks Are Coming (1951) with Lewis Seiler, a flag-waving war film using
copious amounts of actual battle footage to enliven the proceedings. At

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 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s

90 minutes, it was arguably Lederman’s most ambitious project, but it

was an assembly line effort, and lacked Lederman’s peculiarly manic
vision. Predictably, Lederman handled the action sequences, while Seiler
(another Warner Bros. studio director who labored in the “B” unit)
handled the dialogue, but the film is ultimately a routine action thriller
lacking any real distinction or commitment to the material. Lederman
then codirected Tarzan’s Savage Fury (1952) with Cy Endfield, in which
Lex Barker took over the title role; where Lederman had once been
entrusted with the production of an entire Tarzan film in the late 1930s,
now he was rarely the “ramrod” who handled the film’s many action
sequences. With this final feature film project, Lederman’s career as a
director of theatrical motion pictures came to an end.
It was an ignominious conclusion to a once promising career, and
Lederman knew it. He was tired, and fading fast. There was only one
place left to go for the journeyman director: television. The burgeoning
medium had an insatiable demand for product, and Lederman stepped
into the breach to help supply the many series episodes that flooded the
airwaves. In addition to his work for television, Lederman supplemented
his meager income by returning to the position of second unit direc-
tor for the first time since 1929’s Gold Diggers of Broadway (although he
did some uncredited second unit work on Irving Cummings’ Lillian
Russell [1940] as a favor to Darryl F. Zanuck, then head of production
at Twentieth Century Fox, as a “thank you” to the man who gave him
his first break as a director in 1927). In 1948, Lederman assisted Roy Del
Ruth in directing The Babe Ruth Story, a sentimental tale of the famed
baseball player, featuring William Bendix as Ruth, with Claire Trevor
improbably cast as his wife. In 1949, Lederman worked with Del Ruth
on the violent crime thriller Red Light, again handling the second unit
chores. But in both cases, it was clearly Del Ruth’s intervention that got
him the jobs; as far as the studio system was concerned, Lederman was
an anachronism.
Yet he still held out hope for a return to the director’s chair. When Daily
Variety ran a front page story in their issue of 2 January 1948, praising
Lederman as one of “only six directors . . . considered good risks by the
men who put up the completion bonds [necessary for financing motion
picture productions],” Lederman proudly pasted it in his personal scrap-
book, after years of neglecting to post trade reviews or other notices of
his work. Indeed, he highlighted the sentence quoted here as a testament
to his reliability as a freelance director, as if, at long last, he had received

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 A Cinema of Violence: The Films of D. Ross Lederman 

some measure of recognition from his colleagues. The article went on to

note that
Only six directors are considered good risks by the men who put up the
completion bonds and indie producers must bow to list if they hope to obtain
needed production coin. Directors named on list were picked solely because
of their speed in turning out small features, which means bond men get a
fast return on their investment without any risk. Ross Lederman, William
Beaudine, Lew Landers, Harold Daniels, Lewis D. Collins and Reginald Le
Borg are the six favored by end money boys. (“Second Money,” 1)

That Lederman topped the list of approved directors no doubt was a

source of pride to the director; the other men named were all proven
genre workhorses, particularly William Beaudine, Lew Landers, and
Reginald Le Borg. Beaudine, indeed, was one of the most prolific direc-
tors in motion picture history, who finished his career in television,
directing episodes of Lassie right up to his death in 1970. Beaudine’s
easygoing personal demeanor got him more work in an industry that is,
after all, composed of only a few key studios, while Lederman’s abrasive
manner would net him relatively few assignments in the new medium,
particularly for a director so accustomed to the demands of rapid, low-
cost production. Lederman directed 11 episodes of The Gene Autry Show
as “David R. Lederman,” then several episodes of the 1951–1953 series The
Range Rider (other episodes being directed by such contemporaries as
George Archainbaud, who made numerous Westerns for Republic, and
William A. Berke), four episodes of Annie Oakley in 1954, and then had
his only real television hit, Captain Midnight.
Easily the most paranoid of all 1950s children’s series, Captain Midnight
aired on CBS on Saturday morning for two years, with a total of 39
episodes shot between August 1954 and February 1956. Lederman directed
all 39 episodes, much to the chagrin of the cast, who uniformly despised
him. But the series was an enormously popular commercial success, and
ironically, it is for these 39 half-hour programs that Lederman is best
remembered today (see Dixon 2005, 13–27, for more on this extraor-
dinary Cold War series). Lederman was now firmly ensconced as TV
director; a 1950 theatrical project on the life of jockey Johnny Longden
had failed to materialize, and Lederman realized that his future was on
the small screen, if indeed he had a future at all (Schallert).
In 1954, with a boost from his success as the director of Captain
Midnight, Lederman made one last attempt in the field of theatrical motion
pictures, as an associate producer on James Edward Grant’s abysmal Ring

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 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s

of Fear (1954). Produced by Robert Fellows and John Wayne, the film
centered on a series of mysterious accidents plaguing the Clyde Beatty
circus (Beatty appeared as himself in the film). Apparently desperate for
help, Beatty’s onscreen persona calls in mystery writer Mickey Spillane
(Spillane played himself in the film, as well) to help unravel the mystery.
Grant, one of John Wayne’s favorite screenwriters, had written some
modestly engaging films in his career, but had directed only one film,
the John Wayne vehicle Angel and the Badman (1947). Grant approached
the task of directing Ring of Fear with unnerving aplomb, telling a local
reporter that
If you can read, you can direct. These guys who think the director is the
kingpin make me ill. If the actors and electricians can read the directions in
the script, they can make the movie with the director not even on the lot.
(Wilson, 1953: 1)

Perhaps not surprisingly, the film soon ran into trouble during produc-
tion, principally because of a hastily constructed script, coauthored by
actor/writer Paul Fix and Grant. Wayne, sensing disaster, asked Spillane
to do an uncredited rewrite, which Spillane pounded out on the set
during production, in return for a white Jaguar sports car as a gift from
Wayne. Despite a relatively lavish budget, color, and the fact that the
film was scheduled to be shot in the 3D “Natural Vision” process (this
last idea was dropped before the film went into production), Ring of Fear
emerged as a commercial and critical failure, barely making a profit at
the box office. Lederman, only marginally associated with the produc-
tion, quietly went back to television work, but offers were drying up.
Still, Lederman made a living directing episodes of various television
shows in the mid-to-late 1950s, notably the ultra-violent Shotgun Slade,
starring Scott Brady as a hired gun in the Old West. On 22–23 October
1959, Lederman directed the series’ episode entitled “The Marriage
Circle” (obviously unrelated to the 1924 Lubitsch feature film of the same
name), featuring Brady, Colleen Gray, and Ted De Corsia in a taut half-
hour drama, with liberal doses of sadistic violence. Lederman’s cast sheet
from the episode survives in his files, along with his notations on the
actors, ranging from “great” to a mere “good”; peculiarly, De Corsia, one
of the screen’s most accomplished villains, is passed over for comment
(D. Ross Lederman papers). Just four days later, on 27–28 October
Lederman led the Shotgun Slade cast and crew through “Treasure Trap,” an
equally violent episode of the series. On 12–13 November 1959 Lederman

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 A Cinema of Violence: The Films of D. Ross Lederman 

returned to the series with one of the series most brutal episodes, “Street
of Terror.” Shotgun Slade was canceled in 1961, partly as a result of protests
against its insistent violence, but Lederman had already moved on, and
was once again looking for work.
On Friday, 22 January 1960, Lederman began work on the final project
of his long career, “Daughter of the Sioux,” an episode of the hour-
long Western series Overland Trail, starring William Bendix and Doug
McClure. The shooting schedule still survives in Lederman’s papers and
demonstrates just how fast he had to work to keep up with the schedule
imposed on him; on the second day of the shoot (Monday, 25 January), he
was expected to complete nearly 70 setups in one day at Iverson’s Ranch,
for a total of 13 2/8 two-eighths pages of script, or about 13 minutes of
actual screen time, in just one day. While some of the scenes are dialogue
setups, most of the day’s shoot is pure action, involving a chase, an
“Indian attack,” and various scenes in which a runaway stagecoach is
brought under control. Working under such difficult conditions is a test
of any director’s skill and ability, as Joseph Kane, another prolific director
of Westerns for Republic Pictures in the 1940s, knew well. Noted Kane,
Take shows like Rawhide, Laramie, Bonanza, Cheyenne, which I did. We had
five days to do those one-hour shows. You’ve got to have forty-eight minutes
of story. Twelve minutes of advertising, main title . . . junk. Five days! And that
didn’t mean you could go nights! You had to start at eight in the morning and
be through at six. So you had forty-five hours. A very tight schedule. You had
to knock off around twenty-eight setups a day. Figure it out—you’ve got to
do a setup every fifteen minutes. And you have to do it, because the following
Monday they start the new one on the same set. They’ve hired the cast the
week you’re shooting. The director is getting ready. And you have to get the
hell off that set by Friday night. Thursday afternoon, the new scripts arrive
on the set, and the crew and the cast are reading the new scripts while you’re
trying to shoot your show! (Flynn and McCarthy, 322–323)

As Lederman’s notes on the shooting of “Daughter of the Sioux” reveal,

he was working considerably faster than Kane, averaging a setup about
every six or seven minutes per shooting day over a five-day period to
complete the episode. Lederman’s production sheet for the episode
survives among his effects, listing all the shots he was required to
complete, with check marks and circles outlining his completed work
for the day. To the surprise of absolutely no one, Lederman brought the
episode in on time, and under budget, but his long stint in the director’s
chair was now over.

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 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s

Ahead lay a somber future, much of it of his own making. Having

alienated his wife, daughter, and many of his business associates,
Lederman was forced to rely on the “kindness of strangers,” living with
Bryan Foy, the prolific producer of program films in the 1930s and 1940s,
ultimately moving into the Motion Picture County Home and Hospital,
where he died on 24 August 1972; he was 77 years of age. Variety and The
Hollywood Reporter carried respectful notices, Variety commenting that
Lederman “started as an extra with Mack Sennett in 1913 and became
a topflight director” (“D. Ross Lederman, Film Pioneer,” n.pag.), while
the Reporter was more restrained in its assessment. Although he left
behind as impressive array of deeply personal and eccentric action films,
Lederman was estranged from his daughter, Joan, until shortly before his
death, and her thoughts on her father’s life are perhaps the best way to
end this overview of Lederman’s life and work, as a deeply conflicted and
troubled man who never found happiness, or any lasting satisfaction, in
family relationships. As his daughter Joan Neville noted,
You need to know that as of the time I was 24 years old, I never saw my father
again until three months before he died. I remember one time when I was
about 13, I was standing in my hallway as John Wayne was leaving the house.
I had just seen him in a movie the night before but, and I really liked the
movie, but I couldn’t say, “Oh I thought you were terrific,” because I thought
“what did he need to know what some kid thinks?” So I never said anything
to him, and many years later, he moved down to Newport Beach and he had a
tennis club, the John Wayne Tennis Club. I was the interior designer for him,
and I got to know him personally. I played bridge with him, but I never told
him that [D. Ross Lederman] was my father for about three years.
Then one night we were doing something, and somehow the subjects
coordinated. I looked over at him and said, “You know, my father is Ross
Lederman.” And he looked at me, absolutely shocked, and said, “You mean
to tell me you’re Ross’s kid?” I said, “Yes,” and he said, and I’m quoting,
“You know, I loved that old son-of-a-bitch, but he was the meanest man I
ever knew.” He had a terrible temper. He either was yelling at me or ignoring
me. I’m certainly not going to glorify the way he acted. He just ran over my
mother like a steamroller. And he was especially mean when he drank. I’ve
always wondered why was he so angry. Maybe that’s why he never spoke of
his mother or his father. I will give him credit for one thing. He paid for my
college education at UCLA. But other than that, he was just mean. Finally, I
moved out of the house lock, stock and barrel. He went to the racetrack one
day, and when he came back, I was gone, including every single thing in my
room.

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 A Cinema of Violence: The Films of D. Ross Lederman 

I remember one time, he had been drinking, and my darling little grandmother
and I were at our house at 120 South Valley; it was a beautiful house, beautiful.
We got scared because he was yelling and screaming at my mother upstairs. He
pretty much terrorized us in a sense. So we called the police. The police came,
and here was my grandmother and I sneaking around the corner, hiding in our
own house. Then my father came down the stairs with his badge as an honor-
ary policeman, from the chief of police at Burbank. He showed the badge to
the police, and they smiled at him, these two police officers, and backed away,
apologized, and then they left. My grandmother and I were terrified of what he
was going to do. But he didn’t do anything to us. He went back upstairs, and
started screaming and yelling at my mother. So that was our home life.
Three months before he died, I somehow heard he was failing. He was out at
the Motion Picture Country Home, and he had problems, kidney and heart
problems. I took my then 16-year-old son, Gregory, who had never seen his
grandfather. When we walked in, my son, a big strapping boy, went over and
kissed him on the cheek. I didn’t ask him to do that, but it was very sweet of
him. Then we sat down, and we talked for almost an hour. During all that
time he talked about himself. He never asked my son what grade he was in,
what sport he liked, what he wanted to do with his life, nothing. He was totally
self-centered. He loved guns. He had a collection of guns. He was really into
that. My mother said, “If you ever kill a deer, I’ll divorce you.” He used to
go duck hunting, and leave dead ducks on the back porch. I remember my
mother finally said, “I will never clean another duck.” He loved to barbecue.
I still have the recipe for his barbecued chicken, marinating in a big yellow
Tom and Jerry bowl all day.
But there is one thing that he said to me that I will never forget as long as I
live. When I was at UCLA, I was living at the sorority house, and I brought
my roommate, Betty Hancock, home with me one day. Betty was a smart girl,
and a good pal, and we were all sitting around talking and suddenly he said,
“Betty, I don’t know what you are doing in college, but you don’t even have
to finish. I can get you a great job. It would probably pay about $500 a week.”
That was a lot of money back then, in 1948. He said, “I’ll get you a job as a
script girl. You would be very good at that. I can get you that job.”

I said, “Gee, Daddy, I would like to do that! I’m very good noticing continu-
ity things; I would be a good script girl.” And he looked at me and said, “Just
forget about that, Joan. You just learn to type, so that when some man leaves you
when you are middle aged, you will have some way to support yourself.” Then
he turned back to Betty, and continued, “Now, Betty, I can get you this job. Why
don’t we talk about it?” and he dismissed me. I mean why? Did he place so little
value on me, or was he just mean, or he didn’t give a darn, or what was it? I don’t
know. To this day I don’t know. I’ll never figure it out. (Neville, 21 October 2005)

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 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s

Joan Neville went on to become a successful interior decorator in

Newport Beach, California, but the scars of her childhood, inflicted by
her father, still remain. Lederman’s kinetic, violent work as a director
mirrored his own hardscrabble life, and the furious pacing of his signa-
ture films is a reflection of his own unhappiness and restlessness as a
working director in mid-twentieth-century America. Alone among his
peers, Lederman’s films have a sheen and polish that enhance, and indeed
highlight, the brutality of his material. Lederman’s films are thus a reflec-
tion of his own personality, even as they reflect the incessant demands of
the classical studio system from the late 1920s to the early 1950s which
forced directors like Lederman to keep grinding out genre films in an
unrelenting torrent, for an audience they would never know. It’s a sad,
corrupt, and violent world that Lederman ultimately offers his viewers,
because that’s all he understood. Knowing this, perhaps, is the key to
an understanding of why D. Ross Lederman’s best films remain compel-
ling in the early years of the twenty-first century. D. Ross Lederman was
never an entertainer. He used the depths of the studio system—complete
with recycled scripts, actors, music, sets, and generic conventions—to
tell us about his life. Bullets Scars, Strange Alibi, The Last Ride, Escape from
Crime, and Adventure in Iraq move swiftly and remorselessly toward their
violent conclusions, with not a moment’s respite.
In the process, they tell us more about the real circumstances of life
in working-class America than escapist films like Leo McCarey’s Going
My Way (1944) ever could. Ironically, the film that arguably displayed
Leo McCarey’s bleak vision of humanity with the greatest accuracy is
his Cold War drama My Son John (1952), a manic film that exists in a
world of ignorance, fear, and claustrophobic paranoia. Like Lederman,
McCarey saw the world as a dangerous place, beset with false ideals and
imminent peril, but for most of his career, McCarey was content to make
generic confections that reinforced the dominant order. But My Son John
delivered a message that no one wanted to hear, even when the film
was first released. Thus, for more than half a century, My Son John was
essentially suppressed, never run on television, becoming available on
DVD only in 2012, while Going My Way has been screened repeatedly on
television since the 1950s, and has been a home video staple since 1992.
Going My Way is blandly reassuring, telling us everything will work out
for the best; but My Son John delivers exactly the opposite message, just
as Lederman’s best films of the 1940s did.

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 A Cinema of Violence: The Films of D. Ross Lederman 

Lederman’s films pop up on TCM from time to time, but only a few of
his early Westerns, and two Warner’s features from the 1940s, are avail-
able on DVD. But it makes sense that this is so, for D. Ross Lederman
never catered to his audiences; like the supreme egoist he was, he made
his films for a pittance, without studio interference, and in the process
created a cinema that was entirely his alone. It did not matter what script
he was required to use, or what actors, or whether it was comedy or an
action film; D. Ross Lederman saw America as a dark, violent maelstrom,
in which only the corrupt and the brutal survive. That was the way he
lived his life, and made his films, and that’s the vision he leaves to us
today, whether we like it or not.

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 3
Juan Orol, Phantom of
the Mexican Cinema
Abstract: In the mid-twentieth-century Mexican cinema,
one filmmaker stands out from all the rest as being almost
erased from cinema history. Juan Orol is one of the most
peculiar of all Mexican cineastes, often compared unjustly
to Ed Wood for the poverty-stricken nature of his films, but
unlike Wood, Orol’s influence was much more pervasive
in Mexico during his lifetime, and he was both far more
prolific and more disciplined. His accomplishments as a
director are real, and lasting. It’s easy to see that Orol was
a driven man, and a driven filmmaker; indeed, as he got
older, the pace of his film production only increased.

Dixon, Wheeler Winston. Dark Humor in Films of the

1960s. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
doi: 10.1057/9781137562500.0006.

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 Juan Orol, Phantom of the Mexican Cinema 

It’s a commonplace thing to discuss the individual vision of filmmak-

ers, on both national and international levels, and the names of Howard
Hawks, John Ford, Quentin Tarantino, Jean-Luc Godard, Roberto
Rossellini, Kenji Mizoguchi, John Frankenheimer, Fritz Lang, Dorothy
Arzner, Agnès Varda, and numerous other cinematic luminaries imme-
diately conjure up a specific worldview, with certain themes, stylistic
tendencies, and narrative tropes being constantly reiterated.
Indeed, it could be argued—and I will do so here—that every direc-
tor, no matter how intellectually or technically impoverished, all the
way down to William Beaudine, Jerry Warren, Victor Adamson, Sam
Newfield, and other denizens of the bottom rung of Poverty Row, has an
individual style and favors certain themes and approaches to the narra-
tives of his/her works. In short, whether the director intends to or not,
in most cases, he or she winds up signing their own name figuratively as
well as literally to every film they make.
In Mexico, the commercial cinema has always been a little crazy,
mashing up genres with frenzied abandon; Luchador films, centering
on professional wrestling, soon crossed over into the horror genre;
Rumberas films, with nonstop musical numbers, soon became inter-
twined with Rancheras, or “Western” films; and gangster films, which,
while adhering to the traditional conventions of the genre, also took
often unexpected turns.
Melodramas like Alberto Gout’s deliriously over the top Aventurera
(1950) were also a hit with audiences, and the simplistic comedy of
Cantinflas was equally popular. On the directorial front, standout figures
from the “Golden Age” of the Mexican cinema like Emilio Fernández
and Luis Buñuel are well known, while such auteurs as Miguel Zacarias,
Julio Bracho, Miguel Delgado, Ismael Rodriguez, and Matilde Landeta
are perhaps less widely appreciated.
But in the mid-twentieth-century Mexican cinema, one filmmaker
stands out from all the rest as being almost erased from cinema history.
His work is virtually unknown outside Mexico, even to this day. Juan
Orol is one of the most peculiar of all Mexican cineastes, often compared
unjustly to Ed Wood for the poverty-stricken nature of his films, but
unlike Wood, Orol’s influence was much more pervasive in Mexico
during his lifetime, and he was both far more prolific and more disci-
plined. His accomplishments as a director are real, and lasting. It’s easy
to see that Orol was a driven man, and a driven filmmaker; indeed, as he
got older, the pace of his film production only increased.

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 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s

Indeed, Orol’s indefatigable industry stands out as one of his most defin-
ing characteristics—that, and his seeming ability to create something out
of almost nothing, despite the most tenuous production circumstances.
Much like the films of African American cineastes Spencer Williams or
Oscar Micheaux, which are also often misinterpreted, it’s a miracle that
Orol got any backing at all for his films, and for the minimal amount
spent, he got the most out of every production dollar. For working in the
Mexican cinema during this period was a difficult proposition from the
word “go”. As an anonymous but surprisingly erudite commentator in
Wikipedia notes,
Decades of labor disputes between studios and talent played a role in bring-
ing about the end of the golden age, but the primary cause was concentration
of studio ownership. During the land reforms of President Lázaro Cárdenas,
American sugar plantation owner and bootlegger William O. Jenkins sold his
land holdings and made a comparatively safer investment in Mexican movie
theaters.
By the mid-1940s, Jenkins owned two theater chains and controlled all film
showings in 12 states. His chains began limiting the exhibition of Mexican
films to allow more Hollywood films to be shown. He also used his influence
in the industry to dictate regulations that limited film production to a few
genres. These low-budget, low quality films became known as “churros.” In
1944, Jenkins invested in Churubusco studios. The company soon came to
dominate the Mexican industry, and by the late 1950s, CLASA, Azteca Films,
and Tepeyac Studios had all either closed or been bought out, leaving only
Jorge Stahl’s San Angel Inn as competition. In 1957, Jenkins bought the theater
chain of Abelardo Rodríguez, his last remaining competitor, effectively taking
control of every aspect of the Mexican cinema industry, from production to
exhibition. The only survivor of the golden days was Luis Buñuel, with films
like El ángel exterminador (The Exterminating Angel) in 1961.

And it is in the land of the churros, so to speak, that we find Juan Orol. His
early life was remarkable in itself, and offered a foretaste of the itinerant
lifestyle to come that would inform the creation of his 57 feature films.
Born Juan Orol García on 4 August 1897 in La Coruña, Galicia, Spain, he
spent his early years shuffling between Mexico and Cuba. When he was
eight years old, his mother shipped him off to Cuba to find his absent
father, and as he grew up, Orol went through a motley series of jobs
including bullfighting (during one bout with a bull he was nearly fatally
gored); professional baseball, at which he was equally inept; as well as
trying his hand at being an auto mechanic, a car salesman, and even a
boxer—all with little success.

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 Juan Orol, Phantom of the Mexican Cinema 

Drifting back to Mexico, Orol fell in with the secret police, and soon
found a job working as a would-be “strong arm” man, and one day was
asked to film an execution. Orol had never used a camera before, but
after a three-minute crash course he hand-cranked his way through this
official “snuff ” film, and was immediately smitten with the possibility of
creating a fantasy world that the cinema represented. From this macabre
beginning, however, Orol segued into a job in radio, and then worked as
an art director for an advertising agency. This led him to film advertising,
and then acting, writing, production, and direction on a full-time basis.
Orol’s first directorial credit was on the 1927 silent film El sendero
gris (codirected with Jesús Cárdenas), but his first big hit was the 1935
maternal tearjerker Madre querida (Beloved Mother), which he produced,
directed, and introduced on screen, with a seemingly heartfelt paean to
all the mothers in the audience, in addition to providing the story for
the film. This was followed by the equally sudsy Honrarás a tus padres
(Honor Thy Mother and Father, 1937), which Orol produced, directed, and
starred in—this last function serving as the beginning of a long string of
performances in his films, despite his somewhat unprepossessing appeal
as a matinee idol.
After exhausting the public’s appetite for melodrama and musicals,
Orol turned to gangster films, and soon became the foremost exponent
of the “Cine Negro Mexicano,” also known as the “Cine de Gangsters.”
It was here that Orol truly found his métier. Orol idolized the Warner
Bros. gangster films of the early 1930s, and imagined himself as a worthy
competitor of the likes of James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and Edward
G. Robinson. Soon, he invented a recurring character that he would play
for most of the rest of his life—Johnny Carmenta, a supposedly suave
denizen of the underworld who would eventually become Orol’s almost
real-life alter ego.
This gave rise to the best-known film of Orol’s long career, the genre-
bending Gángsters contra charros (Gangsters Against Cowboys, 1948),
in which Orol, as gangster Johnny Carmenta, battles cowboy Pancho
Domínguez (José Pulido) in a Mexico City turf war, further complicated
by the presence of cabaret dancer Rosa (Rosa Carmina, who was also
Orol’s third wife at the time), who deftly plays one man off against the
other. As with most of Orol’s films, most of the 79-minute running time
of Gángsters contra charros comprises long dialogue scenes, in which
Orol and Pulido threaten each other with a singular lack of conviction,
interspersed with equally interminable series of dance numbers, making

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 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s

the film in effect a gangster/cowboy/musical, and despite its shoddy

production values, audiences flocked to the film, and Orol seemed
utterly unstoppable.
Demonstrating the truth of Jack Warner’s oft repeated mantra,
“successful films aren’t made; they’re remade,” Orol created an updated
version of Madre querida (Beloved Mother) in 1951, and then continued
on for the next two decades with such offerings as El sindicato del crimen
(The Crime Syndicate, 1954), Zonga, el ángel diabólico (Zonga, the Diabolical
Angel, 1958), Antesala de la silla eléctrica (Prelude to the Electric Chair, 1968,
which was actually shot in Miami, Florida), and Historia de un gangster
(Story of a Gangster, 1969).
Ever conscious of changing trends, Orol even ventured into psychede-
lia with El fantástico mundo de los hippies (The Fantastic World of Hippies,
1972), which featured “50 authentic hippies,” according to the film’s
poster. He directed his last film in 1979, but continued to work as an
actor until 1981. So that’s 54 years in the cinema—quite a long career. In
the early 1980s, Orol suddenly became “respectable,” in the same fashion
that the equally prolific Roger Corman, once dismissed as a hack, was
later embraced as an authentic cultural icon.
There was a retrospective of Orol’s work in 1981, but in 1982, tragedy
struck. As Adán Griego writes, “in early 1982 a fire destroyed Mexico’s
National Film Archives (Cineteca Nacional). The flames consumed the
history of a vibrant film industry that had once rivaled that of the United
States in production output. Gone were more than six thousand films,
scripts and photographs.” Orol had deposited all the negatives and prints
of his films in the archive, certain that they would be saved for posterity.
And now, in a single stroke, everything was gone.
The last six years of Orol’s life were very dark. When he died, on 26 May
1988, at the age of 91, he was sure that he would not be remembered, and
that all of his work had perished in the flames of the Cineteca Nacional
fire. But, as fate or luck would have it, after his death, his celebrity grew
to ever higher levels, and archivists and fans scoured attics, obscure
archives, old collections of 16mm and 35mm prints, and in time, nearly
all of his work was recovered.
Now we have a film biography of Orol, shot in 2012, and it’s a funny
and fascinating film, which captures both the essence of the man and
his indomitable persistence in making one film after another, no matter
what. Titled El Fantástico Mundo De Juan Orol (The Fantastic World of
Juan Orol), a clear reference to El fantástico mundo de los hippies, it’s the

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 Juan Orol, Phantom of the Mexican Cinema 

debut feature film of Sebastien de Amo, and was well received in Mexico,
winning three Ariels (the Mexican equivalent of the Academy Award)
for Best Actor—Roberto Sosa as Orol; Best Cinematography—Carlos
Hidalgo; and Best Costume Design—Deborah Medina. Sebastien de
Amo received an Ariel nomination for Best First Work for the film,
but didn’t win, yet the film is clearly an accomplished piece of work. As
Devon Pack writes,
What really gives the film both magic and a comedy is that the film takes
place largely within the delusional perspective of Juan Orol. He is coaxed
through the setbacks of his life by [his] Tyler Durden-esque alter ego,
Johnny Carmenta. This zoot-suited eidolon is always there to offer advice,
and to take over when more ruthlessness is required. Much of the humor
of the film lays in how Orol’s confidence renders him impervious to
criticism—every film he is making is a masterpiece of noir, even when the
machine guns don’t break glass (because smashing glass windows would be
expensive). While it resembles the campy noir style of Burton’s Ed Wood,
El Fantástico Mundo De Juan Orol spends little time on the process of film-
making, and much more time on how Orol’s enthusiasm draws people into
working for him.

Shot in richly saturated black and white, and introduced with actual
footage of Orol introducing the 1935 version of Madre querida with seem-
ingly earnest sincerity, followed by scenes from several of Orol’s gangster
films, El Fantastic Mundo de Juan Orol is clearly a love letter to the late
director, who is recognized for his accomplishments rather than being
chastised for his shortcomings. As detailed, when William O. Jenkins
took control of the Mexican film industry, it became almost impossible
to work within the country, as Jenkins would pay minimal fees to direc-
tor/producers for their works, and then insist that they pay for all the
advertising as well, thus reducing their takings to nearly nothing.
When the time came for the next film, Jenkins would blandly tell film-
makers that he would advance them a loan for their upcoming project,
provided that they mortgage all of their previous films with him, and
even their houses and other personal property, simply to obtain financ-
ing, at a ruinous rate of 20 per year. Indeed, conditions in Mexico
during this period were so dire that the Academia Mexicana de Artes y
Ciencias Cinematográficas—the equivalent of Hollywood’s Academy of
Motion Picture Arts and Sciences—didn’t even bother to award Ariels
from 1959 to 1971, on the grounds that the films were so poor in quality
that there was no reason to do so.

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 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s

As Juan Orol, Roberto Sosa is both a dead ringer for the late director,
as well as maintaining an air of bland assurance throughout the film.
Certain incidents are fictionalized, as in nearly every biopic, but as Orol,
Sosa is completely unflappable, and no matter how badly he does as a
matador or professional baseball player, and even when the critics tear
him to shreds in their daily reviews, he seems absolutely indifferent. For
Orol, it’s the public that counts, and he’s making films for the masses, not
the critics.
In doing so, even on the cheap, Orol ties in to many of the nascent
dreams of his audience members, who would love to settle the problems
with a gun, or have a gorgeous rhumba dancer swoon in their arms, and
live in the seedy yet glamorous world of Mexico City nightlife of the era.
Orol’s key period as a filmmaker is obviously from the 1930s to the early
1960s, but that’s an awfully long run, wouldn’t you think? To maintain
box-office popularity for three decades is no mean feat; in the end, it was
advancing years, more than anything else, that put an end to his career.
Toward the end of El Fantástico Mundo De Juan Orol, as the film moves
smoothly into the mid-1960s, Orol is visited by a representative from
Eastman Kodak, who assures him that if he continues to make films
in black and white, he will soon become obsolete. Technicolor is out;
single strip color film is the new technology. In a charmingly innocent
sequence, the sales rep touches various objects in the room, which
immediately spring to life in full color, until the entire room is bursting
with light, as Orol beams in delight. From there, the film shifts entirely
to color, as did Orol’s films, but one gets the real sense that something
substantial has been lost. The gritty black-and-white world of Orol’s
low-budget universe has been replaced by something far less substantial;
the shadows become less pronounced, and the lighting becomes more
garish. By the time the film gets to the re-created scenes from El fantás-
tico mundo de los hippies, it seems that an entire world has been lost. Juan
Orol was never meant for a color universe; his films, and his vision, were
something phantasmal, meant for the shadows.
Dubbed the creator of “accidental surrealism,” the world that Orol’s
films depict is at once alluring and evanescent, existing in a twilight zone
of cheap sets, shabby nightclub acts, and the seemingly eternal presence
of Orol’s gangster alter ego. Like Roger Corman in his best films, his early
black-and-white work from the 1950s, Orol presented his viewers with a
world of pervasive corruption, yet infused with his own sense of indomi-
table optimism. Pop culture reflects the needs and desire of the time in

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 Juan Orol, Phantom of the Mexican Cinema 

which it is created; at Orol’s retrospective, only a few patrons showed up,

while during his heyday, his films packed movie houses throughout the
country, earning record grosses, but were never really allowed to find an
audience outside Mexico. In short, he knew precisely what his audiences
wanted to see.
Hot-wiring existing genres into a mind-bending meld all his own,
Orol created a cinema that is absolutely unique, and utterly without
precedent. Emilio Fernández and Luis Buñuel, who both knew him,
would agree; whatever his faults, Juan Orol was doing precisely what he
wanted to, answering to no one but himself, and yet at the same time
creating films that the public clamored to see, cloaking his own vision
in the venerable disguise of a genre filmmaker—which he was, and yet
he wasn’t. This, perhaps, is his most significant accomplishment, one any
cineaste would envy. Now, how about an Orol DVD or Blu-ray box set,
with all new digital masters? It seems only right.

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 4
Missing in Action: The Lost
Version of Vanishing Point
Abstract: Much has been written on Richard C.
Sarafian’s existential road movie Vanishing Point (1971),
a shambling, glorious wreck of a film that nevertheless
manages to achieve a certain sort of ragged splendor in
its countercultural tale of loner driver Kowalski (Barry
Newman), who takes on a nearly impossible drive from
Denver to San Francisco to deliver a Dodge Challenger
in less than 24 hours. Based on two true life stories, one
of a San Diego police officer who was kicked off the force
in disgrace, and another one of a man who died after a
high-speed chase which led to his crashing into a police
roadblock, Vanishing Point is pure twentieth-century high
octane nihilism.

Dixon, Wheeler Winston. Dark Humor in Films of the

1960s. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
doi: 10.1057/9781137562500.0007.

 DOI: 10.1057/9781137562500.0007
 Missing in Action: The Lost Version of Vanishing Point 

Much has been written on Richard C. Sarafian’s existential road movie

Vanishing Point (1971), a shambling, glorious wreck of a film that never-
theless manages to achieve a certain sort of ragged splendor in its coun-
tercultural tale of loner driver Kowalski (Barry Newman), who takes on a
nearly impossible drive from Denver to San Francisco to deliver a Dodge
Challenger in less than 24 hours. Based on two true life stories, one of
a San Diego police officer who was kicked off the force in disgrace, and
another one of a man who died after a high-speed chase which led to
his crashing into a police roadblock, Vanishing Point is pure twentieth-
century high octane nihilism—but with a twist, as we shall see.
The archetypal loner, Kowalski (no first name is ever given), has a
checkered past; at various times a race car driver, a policeman kicked
off the force for stopping his partner from raping a woman during a
routine traffic stop, and a Vietnam veteran, Kowalski has clearly given
up on life, and seeks only speed and escape. For the lure of the road is
strong. Delivering cars in the 1960s from coast to coast was a racket that
many of us from that era used as a means of cheap transportation; in
the back pages of The Village Voice there were always a plethora of adver-
tisements for drivers to deliver cars from New York to Los Angeles or
San Francisco, just to bring their car quickly, in one piece, in return for
minimal food and lodging. Though I didn’t drive at that point, I went
along on one such venture in 1969 from Philadelphia to Los Angeles, in a
car driven by a friend of mine.
We hit Nashville the first night, Albuquerque the next, and Los Angeles
the next day. We kept the radio blasting rock and roll, drank tons of coffee,
and crashed only for a few hours each night, only to resume our journey in
the morning. And, of course, we always drove over the speed limit, especially
in the desert, and after a while, the entire trip became a sort of dream, or
endless quest. How fast could we get there? How fast could we drive without
getting arrested? How little sleep and food could we get away with? With
the AM radio exploding with top 40 pop, and signals fading in and out as
we sped from one town to the next, we were urged on by a series of motor-
mouth DJs to go faster, further, to push the whole trip to the boundaries of
human endurance, until we hit Los Angeles in a deep fog at 5AM on the
third morning, waking up a sleeping attendant in a gas station to get some
fuel, and then actually opening the car door to follow the dotted white line
in the road because we couldn’t see where we were going.
Even so, once we arrived in Los Angeles, my friend stayed there, but
without sleep, I continued to push on to San Francisco, now hitching

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 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s

my way through the night with a variety of erstwhile companions, still

accompanied by the sound of the blasting AM pop radio, now on a port-
able transistor set, until, exhausted, I reached the home of my friend, the
filmmaker Jerome Hiler, completely unannounced, and after a breakfast
of pancakes and eggs, slept for two days. So I know something—just a
little—of what Kowalski is going through in Vanishing Point, although in
his case, although he calls San Francisco “home,” he really has no place to
go, no place to rest, and seems to exist on Benzedrine and little else. He
never stops for food, he never seems to rest, he even pops his “bennies”
without water—he’s a man continually on the move.
Kowalski is trying to escape his past, but he can’t; he’s driving simply
to drive, and he’s not going to stop for anything or anyone—it’s speed,
speed, and more speed, a life of pure adrenalin. On his way out of Denver
late Friday night, Kowalski stops by a biker bar to score some speed from
his pal Jake (Lee Weaver), and bets him he’ll make it to San Francisco by
Saturday 3PM—way ahead of schedule. Jake is skeptical, but Kowalski
is on a mission—indeed, when he first pulls into the garage on Friday
night to pick up the Challenger, we have no idea when he’s last slept at
all, if ever. Like a shark, Kowalski has to keep moving or die, constantly
in motion, and constantly evading those who would seek to knock him
out of the game.
For, not surprisingly, Kowalski’s epic speed trip soon attracts the
attention of the police in the various states he crisscrosses on his way to
the West Coast, and as he crosses one state line after another, the cops
play tag team with him, each group hoping to stop him for good. From
Colorado to Utah to Nevada and finally to California, Kowalski has got
the cops on the run—but they’re gaining on him, and with each new
state line, the obstacles get tougher and tougher to deal with.
But Kowalski has help from the DJ Super Soul (Cleavon Little, in an
excellent performance), a blind soul R&B record spinner who works at a
rundown, yet high wattage AM radio station KOW in the middle of the
desert, and has a seemingly telepathic connection with Kowalski, help-
ing him to avoid the police, who are in hot pursuit of what Super Soul
terms “the last American hero.” And as Kowalski crashes through road-
block after roadblock, making the police look like chumps, he becomes
a symbol of the underdog fighting against the system, though, of course,
he’s bound to lose.
Kowalski soon realizes that Super Soul—blasting R&B and keeping up
a constant stream of cryptic patter—is keeping him informed of speed

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 Missing in Action: The Lost Version of Vanishing Point 

traps and police roadblocks, and for much of his run to the coast, the
bond between the two men keeps Kowalski from being arrested. And
Super Soul performs another service for Kowalski—he turns him into
an instant pop culture hero. Soon, the idea of Kowalski as the “ultimate
outlaw,” sticking it to the man, gains pop currency, and people gather at
the radio station to cheer Super Soul and Kowalski on.
Along the way, Kowalski, who has rejected conventional society with
a vengeance—and after all, what has it done for him?—meets a variety
of counterculture types, including a crazed old snake handler (Dean
Jagger, in another strong turn) who catches rattlesnakes for evangelical
religious ceremonies. This is one of the more bizarre side trips in the
movie, though Jagger does his best with the material, but it’s much too
obvious, and seems an interruption in the narrative, which works best
when Kowalski is on the move.
But in the meantime, some disgruntled local police and rednecks have
decided that they’ve had enough of Super Soul’s idolization of Kowalski
and his mythic run for the border, and break into the radio station,
smashing it to bits, severely beating up both Super Soul and his engineer.
Super Soul’s broadcast is now co-opted by the police, and rather than
helping Kowalski, Super Soul is now being forced to lead him into a
trap.
Speeding down the highway near the California border, Kowalski
meets a biker named Angel (Timothy Scott), who pulls up beside him
at 90 MPH and offers his help, if needed. Kowalski waves him off at
first, but then decides that some more speed is in order, and Angel takes
Kowalski back to his commune for some more uppers to keep him going,
while Angel’s unnamed girlfriend (Gilda Texter) rides around nude on
a motorcycle in a deliberately provocative manner. When Angel leaves
to do some reconnaissance for Kowalski, she almost immediately offers
herself to Kowalski for sex.
Nonplussed—he really isn’t interested in sex, just speed—Kowalski
turns her down, and when Angel returns they strap a beat-up old bike,
a siren, and a flashing red light on the rooftop of the Challenger, and get
through another roadblock, but this trick is the last victory. The police
have been tracking Kowalski’s progress electronically with the aid of a
battery of roadside monitors, which display his route, speed, and location
on an electronic wall map. In the border town of Cisco, California, the
local police set up two bulldozers in the middle of the road, guaranteed
to stop anything. Meanwhile, Super Soul, returning to the decimated

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 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s

radio station with his engineer in tow, regains control of the console and
reaches out to Kowalski one last time, to warn him of his impending
doom. But it’s too late; “turn it off,” he tells the engineer. For Kowalski
has now turned to another radio station, booming out more up-tempo
pop, but without the guiding hand of someone seeking to protect him.
With an enormous smile on his face that seems to grow more
pronounced with each cut back, Kowalski plows full speed into the
bulldozers, and the Challenger goes up in a fireball, reduced to a flam-
ing wreck in seconds. The film thus ends where it began; in the opening
minutes of the film, we see the bulldozers being set up as the locals look
on in disinterested stupefaction, and a CBS news truck pulls up to cover
the story. The film then cuts back to Kowalski picking up the car in
Denver, and then follows him through to the fatal crash.
More than one critic has suggested that like Sisyphus, Kowalski will be
condemned to repeat this cycle again and again, dying only to be reborn
in another life. But even if this were true, it would seem that Kowalski’s
journey has been completed, and that only Super Soul, as some sort of
benevolent seer, or guide, has had any impact on Kowalski’s life. But
something’s missing, and it’s available only on the initial US release of
the DVD, which presents two versions of the film with almost no fanfare;
the 98-minute standard US version, and the 105-minute cut featuring a
key, lost sequence with none other than Charlotte Rampling—absolutely
assured as usual—as a mysterious hitchhiker in the dead of night, suit-
case in hand.
Impulsively, Kowalski offers her a lift. She gets in Kowalski’s car, gets
him stoned on marijuana for the first time in the film—up until then it’s
only been speed—and then suddenly tells him that “I’ve been waiting for
you for a long time. Oh, how I’ve waited for you. Everywhere and since
forever. Patiently. Patiently. That’s the only way to wait for somebody.” For
the first time in the film, Kowalski seems to really relax, and the tension
goes out of his body; he pulls over the car, and when the young woman
asks why they’re stopping, he tells her simply, “I’m getting stoned.” She
smiles, pulls Charlotte over for a deep kiss, and the film fades to black.
When Kowalski awakens the next morning, she’s gone without a trace.
In contrast to the more realistic, if sometimes stereotypical characters
Kowalski encounters on his coast-to-coast trip, Rampling’s spectral
appearance is something altogether different, raising the film to a much
more thoughtful level of introspection with just one small, seven-minute
sequence. Barry Newman never broke through as a major star, by any

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 Missing in Action: The Lost Version of Vanishing Point 

means, but in most of his films and television work, he didn’t really have
actors whom he could really engage with.
Rampling offers something altogether different for Newman, and
the scene between the two of them puts the film in an entirely different
perspective, from first frame to last. This version was released theatri-
cally in the United Kingdom, but not in the United States, where the film
received indifferent and uncomprehending reviews initially, and has only
fairly recently been the subject of a serious reevaluation. Yet amazingly,
the UK version isn’t available on DVD in the United Kingdom; it’s only
the flip side of the initial US release, and that’s it. It isn’t even featured as
a significant extra, and yet it’s really the only version of the film that one
should seriously consider. So, much like Rampling’s appearance in the
film itself, it’s a rather phantasmal release, but I would argue that with-
out this segment, the film really isn’t complete. Director Sarafian, who
provided commentary for the US and the UK versions of the film on
the 2004 US double-sided DVD release, agreed, noting that Rampling’s
character was an metaphorical vision of the Angel of Death.
For his part, Barry Newman seemed particularly displeased with the
deletion of the scene, in what is probably his best film; clearly, much of
the resonance of the original version was lost with this edit. As he noted,
[T]here was a wonderful scene where Kowalski stops the car and picks up
a hitchhiker, played by Charlotte Rampling. The girl, dressed in black and
shrouded in fog, is carrying a sign that says San Francisco. He picks her up,
she gets into the car and she asks him “What are you?” He answers, “a car
delivery driver.” She says, “No, what sign are you?” [They’re both Scorpios,
it turns out.] They talk and end up spending the night together in the desert.
Suddenly she says, “Don’t go to San Francisco,” and vanishes. She was the
symbol of death. That was an interesting scene, because it really gave the film
an allegorical lift and explains everything.
I was in Austria filming The Salzburg Connection while they were editing
Vanishing Point, and I received a call from my agent in New York. He had
just seen a screening of Vanishing Point and said they cut it up and made it
look like a “B” movie. They cut out the Rampling scenes because they were
afraid the audience wouldn’t understand what happened to the girl in the car;
why was she suddenly not there? At the time it was made, we were still living
in the sixties, with the individual against the institutions—the establishment.
The individual, the loner, the anti-hero was very, very popular then, and it
was a very moving thing when the guy killed himself. When he died, it stayed
with people. They came back and saw the film over and over again. I was
never aware of the impact of the film while I was making it.

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 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s

[Kowalski was] a man who has failed before—and that’s the allegorical thing in
this film—that Kowalski was going to get through those bulldozers. He smiles
as he rushes to his death at the end of Vanishing Point because he believes he
will make it through the roadblock. Deep down, Kowalski may have believed
he wasn’t going to make it, but that’s the basis of an existentialist film. The
hero is fated to die [from the opening structure of the film, which ends at the
beginning, and repeats this at the end] and you know it when he takes off that
he’s not going to live. The title Vanishing Point was meant not for his impact
into the bulldozers [ . . . ] It represents Kowalski’s point of no return—it was his
Vanishing Point—it was his last ride. (as qtd. in Zazarine, 1986)

I’ve always liked Vanishing Point, which, despite some roughness and a
few overdetermined sequences, is more of an existential road movie than
Monte Hellman’s Two Lane Blacktop—made the same year—could ever
hope to be. It’s Newman’s best film, Sarafian’s best film—sadly, he died in
2013—and it’s clearly a labor of love on the part of all concerned. Shot in
just 38 days, it’s obvious that everyone pushed themselves to the limit to
make the film as good as it is; as Sarafian rhetorically noted on the DVD
commentary, for a commercial Hollywood director, “how often do you
get to make a film that really means something?”
On the DVD commentary for the film, Sarafian noted that he always
referred to the film in jest as “Vanishing Points,” because he was forced
by Darryl F. Zanuck and 20th Century Fox to give back some of his back-
end participation points when he went over budget by $80,000—think of
it, just $80,000—on a total budget of $1.3 million. But with the Charlotte
Rampling sequence, it becomes a whole new movie, and you can really
see what the entire project was aiming at from the beginning.
For now, you can only hope to get a Region One DVD of the early
2004 DVD release with the double-sided disc to get the UK version of
the film. The Blu-ray version offers only the US cut, which is a shame.
While it’s not a “B” movie by any means in the US version, it’s merely a
more thoughtful-than-average action film with some metaphysical over-
tones. With the additional footage added, it crosses over into a different
zone altogether—sort of like an Antonioni movie on methamphetamine.
If you like Vanishing Point now, you really should make an effort to see
the complete version—it really does make all the difference. The uncut
Vanishing Point is a denser, much richer film altogether; one wonders
what would have happened to both Sarafian and Newman’s careers if
their original vision had made it, without interference, to the screen.

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 5
The Invisible Cinema
of Marcel Hanoun
Abstract: When Marcel Hanoun died on 22 September
2012 at the age of 82, it caused barely a ripple in the
media, and even in the world of experimental cinema.
And yet Hanoun was a major filmmaker, whose near total
critical eclipse after an initial burst of critical interest is an
indictment of cinema history as a function of canon. It’s
true that Hanoun’s films are difficult, but no more so than
Jean-Luc Godard’s, who was a fan of Hanoun’s work; it’s
true that Hanoun turned his back on commercial cinema
to work as a perennial outsider, but again, cinema has
many rebellious figures in its history who continue to hold
a claim on our memory. But Hanoun is in death, as he was
in life, an almost phantom auteur, “discovered” in the early
1960s, and then summarily dismissed.

Dixon, Wheeler Winston. Dark Humor in Films of the

1960s. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
doi: 10.1057/9781137562500.0008.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137562500.0008 
 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s

When Marcel Hanoun died on 22 September 2012 at the age of 82, it

caused barely a ripple in the media, and even in the world of experimen-
tal cinema. And yet Hanoun was a major filmmaker, whose near total
critical eclipse after an initial burst of critical interest is an indictment of
cinema history as a function of canon. It’s true that Hanoun’s films are
difficult, but no more so than Jean-Luc Godard’s, who was an admirer
of Hanoun’s work; it’s true that Hanoun turned his back on commercial
cinema to work as a perennial outsider, but again, cinema has many
rebellious figures in its history who continue to hold a claim on our
memory. As Hanoun himself put it,
[W]ith poor and derisory resources, with the help and goodwill of those
who have worked with me, I have been able to make my films. I have stolen
them, torn them from a place in the shadows rarely offered to the Public,
forbidden. My films have been removed from the propaganda of a certain
critical intelligentsia—conventional, servile, lacking creativity and a spirit of
discovery, surviving solely via association with a single commercial prospec-
tive. Today I offer up my own accomplished creations to the creative side, the
conscious side, for the awakening of each of us, for the one found perpetually
locked inside an anonymous entity, depersonalized, reduced to a global mass,
the Public. I offer up individually, to whomever so desires them, my stolen
films. (in Brenez, 2009)

But Hanoun is in death, as he was in life, an almost phantom auteur,

“discovered” in the early 1960s, and then summarily dismissed. There is
a French Wikipedia page on Hanoun, provided in the Works Cited list,
but not one in English. Most of his films, with the exception of his first,
Un Simple Histoire (1958), are not readily available. His list of film credits
on official websites like IMDB is woefully inaccurate. What critical writ-
ing there is on him in English is mostly from the 1960s and 1970s, and
after that, it just stops. Indeed, for most of his films, there’s scant infor-
mation to be had in any language. To me, this is inexplicable. Hanoun’s
importance is clear. Nevertheless, it’s a sobering fact; most people have
never heard of Marcel Hanoun.
In Fandor, David Hudson wrote a moving obituary for the Hanoun,
but also pointed out that his work had never really achieved widespread
acceptance, through no fault of its own. As Hudson noted, summariz-
ing the often-hostile reception Hanoun’s work received when it first
appeared,
“The great French filmmaker Marcel Hanoun, too little recognized, has died
of a heart attack,” tweets Adrian Martin. “A true giant of cinema.” On the

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 The Invisible Cinema of Marcel Hanoun 

Facebook page dedicated to Hanoun, [critic] Nicole Brenez bids farewell to a

“genius,” and La Furia Umana notes that “his last text was a love letter” written
for the magazine: “[W]e are so sad for his death, and so proud for this letter.
We will protect and remember his Work.”
When Hanoun’s first film, Une Simple Histoire, screened at the New York Film
Festival in 1970, it didn’t exactly win over Roger Greenspun, who noted in
the New York Times that, though it was made in 1958, “it looks more like 1938,
with its dark, low-contrast photography (it was shot in 16mm), its unglam-
orous realism, and its heroine with her penciled eyebrows and her unstyl-
ishly bobbed hair . . . The telling of the story, the young woman’s narrative,
is imposed on the action in such a way as to deny each scene any ordinary
dramatic interest and instead to substitute a counterpointing between the
description (which is very flat) and the actual realization (also very flat—and
with dialogue subdued beneath the narrative voice). At first this method
seems pregnant with understated tension, but in time you come to realize that
nothing more is happening than appears to be happening, and the method
begins to seem silly.” For Greenspun, “in the midst of the many deprivations
that constitute his style there is a kind of pretentiousness—ostentatiousness,
really—as if he were taking pride in poverty.”
In response to another negative review, one by Stuart Byron that ran in the
Village Voice in September 1970, Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote a moving reply
a few months later: “in the frantic setting of a film festival . . . , there is little
chance of a masterpiece like Une Simple Histoire receiving the kind of atten-
tion it deserves . . . In broad terms, Une Simple Histoire can be described as a
Bressonian analysis of an Italian neorealist subject, although each of these
adjectives can be applied only to a limited degree . . . . By linking the present
tense of the filmed events with the past tense of the narration, Hanoun
encourages us to focus on the various ways in which these two narrative lines
complement, echo, or contradict one another . . . . Une Simple Histoire creates a
new kind of filmic reality, a fugue-like narrative form which infuses a simple
story with unnatural beauty and power.”
“Were it not for Marcel Hanoun’s Une Simple Histoire I would probably look
upon [Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959)] as the new wave’s most
substantial contribution to film art,” wrote Noel Burch in the Winter 1959
issue of Film Quarterly. “Hanoun’s achievement justifies, I feel, in fact demands
henceforth a redoubled severity on the part of the film critic. This film’s very
existence, which proves that the seventh art is capable of a discipline and a
degree of abstraction comparable to that of contemporary painting or music,
no longer allows us even to pretend to tolerate the enlightened amateur-
ism of a Francois Truffaut, let alone the ‘professionalism’ of a Minnelli or a
Preminger. In this respect, Hanoun’s revolution may be likened to Webern’s,

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 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s

for it is above all by his attitude that the director of Une Simple Histoire has
broken new ground.”

Ultimately, Hanoun never got the respect in life that he deserved as a

result of these early reviews, and all the ingredients are here for a good
cinematic scandal, with one critic attacking another critic, differing
viewpoints espoused, screenings and rescreenings of Hanoun’s film to
bring the argument to a boiling point—but none of that ever happened.
As it turned out, Une Simple Histoire was one of the few—if not the
only—of Hanoun’s films to get regular distribution in the United States
or abroad—most of his work, shot largely in 16mm, never received any
formal distribution on an international level. And so, for all intents and
purposes, it was invisible.
Oddly enough, an anonymous critic for the mass-circulation maga-
zine Time (probably my late friend Brad Darrach, who wrote most of the
film criticism for that staunchly conservative journal) had a somewhat
more favorable view, commenting that “the film chronicles the wander-
ings of a woman and child looking for work and lodging in Paris. This
is the only plot, and Hanoun has little interest in embellishing it with
background and motivation: he never even makes it clear, for example,
whether the woman is the child’s mother, guardian, or companion. Une
Simple Histoire is, more than a narrative, a formal stylistic exercise so
rigorously disciplined and understated that it makes the visual asceti-
cism of Robert Bresson seem almost Fellini-esque by comparison” (as
qtd. in French Culture Org).
But this lukewarm praise was not enough to save the film from near
oblivion, despite the fact that Une Simple Histoire won the Grand Prix
Eurovision at Cannes in 1959. Une Simple Histoire was Hanoun’s first as
a director, but in a curious fashion, the film’s relative critical “failure”
seemingly marked an end of sorts to Hanoun’s career just as it was getting
started. He went on to direct more than 60 more films of varying length,
but somehow he never really escaped the shadow of Une Simple Histoire’s
contentious debut.
Born in Tunisia on 26 October 1929, Marcel Hanoun came to the
cinema relatively late in life, as an exhilic director. Visiting France as a
child with his parents, he came back to Paris permanently after the end
of World War II, and in the 1950s studied under André Vigneau at CERT
(Centre d’Etudes de Radio Television), while working as a journalist to
support himself. Drawn to the films of Robert Bresson, in particular

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 The Invisible Cinema of Marcel Hanoun 

Un condamné à mort s’est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut (aka A Man

Escaped, 1956), Hanoun began to theorize a cinema in which the word
and image were separated and given equal value.
In this, Hanoun was working along the same lines of thought as the
racial experimental filmmaker Jean Isidore Isou, whose Traité de bave et
d’éternité (Venom & Eternity, 1951) proceeded along similar lines, but with
a much more violent approach. While Isou used scratched leader, upside
down stock footage, and out-of-focus footage of himself interminably
wandering the streets of Paris for his visuals, with theoretical diatribes
intercut with Lettrist poetry on the soundtrack to create a world where
all is chaos, Hanoun’s quiet, contemplative style, using a static camera
and images that force the viewer to concentrate on the most quotidian
aspects of existence, accentuates the dichotomy between sound and
image which is implicit in all of cinema.
After Un Simple Histoire marked him as a member of the “outsider”
school of cinema, and met with such critical resistance, Hanoun attempted
to go mainstream, or as mainstream as he could, with Le huitième jour
(The Eighth Day, 1960), starring New Wave icon Emmanuelle Riva, but
was unhappy with the conventional nature of the finished project. This
prompted Hanoun to leave France for Spain, where he created a number
of documentaries over the next several years, before he hit on his signa-
ture style, in which he acknowledged the “constructed” nature of each
film he directed, and the creation of the film in every aspect became an
inextricable part of the fabric of his work; 16mm prints of his work began
to find their way to America, where Jonas Mekas, the Godfather of the
New American Cinema, or “underground film” movement, immediately
recognized the brilliance of his work.
With his next major work, L’authentique procès de Carl-Emmanuel Jung
(The Authentic Trial of Carl Emmanuel Jung, 1966), Hanoun used a near
documentary style to portray the imaginary trail of the title character,
cast in the film as the former commandant of a Nazi concentration
camp, finally called to account for his actions. The “real” Carl Jung, of
course, held no such position, but his close association with a number
of official Nazi organizations, and his implicit approval of Hitler’s regime
through most of the war, remains deeply problematic for most observ-
ers. In this film, Hanoun suggests that “his” Jung has been seduced by a
life of postwar luxury, and is all too willing to forget his past, even as he
is directly confronted with it. Shot in stark black-and-white 35mm, the
film is by turns abrasive, seductive, and damning, ultimately leaving any

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 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s

“moral judgments” entirely up to the viewer, thus making the spectator,

in a sense, the cocreator of the film.
But for me, Hanoun’s most sublime films are his quartet of works
revolving around the seasons; L’été (Summer, 1968), L’hiver (Winter, 1969),
L’automne (Autumn, 1971), and Le printemps (Spring, 1972), films which
today are almost impossible to see with any reasonable image quality. L’été
remains a personal favorite of mine, perhaps for sentimental reasons. I
was in Europe during the Events of May in 1968, and remember vividly
the dismay that was felt throughout Europe when Russian tanks moved
into Czechoslovakia as the Summer ended, an event recounted in L’été as
a voice on the radio brings news of the invasion, marking the end of the
so-called Czech Spring.
In L’été, for most of the film, which takes place after the events of May,
a young woman spends her time in a house in the country, waiting for
others to join her, but even at this close proximity to the event, Hanoun
is scrupulous about noting that “I didn’t shoot during May, ‘68; I did it in
August, a close and yet distant date from that. The essential commitment
of my films lies on their form and structure, on their ruptures. For me,
that’s where commitment lies on a film” (as qtd. in FICUNAM).
The subsequent films in the “seasons” group become ever more
reflexive, involved in the mechanics of making a film. Still, at this point,
Hanoun was able to work in 35mm film, and in Le Printemps, he created
sumptuous allegory in which he “tells two parallel stories: a man, fleeing
the forces of order, takes refuge in the forest, while a young girl living
with her grandmother in a nearby village approaches the threshold of
adolescence, and begins to discover both the world and herself ” (as qtd. in
French Culture Org). But as Hanoun’s vision as filmmaker became clearer,
he was moving further away with each new film from what conventional
cinema audiences expected, and was eventually forced to work in Super
8mm and video to keep pursuing his deeply individualistic vision.
In all of this work, Hanoun’s films began to push back even further
against audience expectations, sometimes seemingly collapsing against
themselves, always acknowledging their imperfect execution in the face
of economic circumstance, and the gap between what one has in one’s
mind and vision that one can ultimately bring to the screen. As Christian
Zimmer and Lee Leggett noted in a 1974 article,
Hanoun’s work . . . does not adhere at all . . . to the level of simple revelation
of a process of production, since from the moment that it is filmed, that it
becomes an object to be filmed, this production deals in fiction like any other

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 The Invisible Cinema of Marcel Hanoun 

scenarist’s invention . . . only for Hanoun could the experience have this char-
acter that is profoundly negating, subversive, anti-commercial. (135)

Although he was sometimes able to shoot in 35mm, Hanoun more often

was forced by economic necessity to work in 16mm, and his lifestyle was
always marginal. He took for himself only that which was absolutely
necessary to live; the rest of his meager funds went into his films. At the
same time, he was always ready to give a hand to a newcomer, something
was beneficial for his own work, and, in the end, afforded valuable expe-
rience to those just beginning in film. As cinematographer and director
Babette Mangolte remembered,
Leaving film school I immediately had to face the fact that I had to make a
living. So I had a very hard time the first year. I could not find jobs. And the
only thing I got, at the beginning, were jobs that did not pay, I accidentally
met someone who had been on the jury at a film festival in Greece and had
given a prize to a film I had worked on when I was in film school. I met him
by accident; he was my neighbor, his name was Marcel Hanoun. And without
that meeting, I would not be here, because I would have never become a
cameraperson. Hanoun did not have any money to pay me, but he needed
somebody to help him in editing and he did train me as an assistant editor,
and later did train me as a cameraperson . . . [Marcel] was always broke, [but]
he taught me something . . . I could use to make a living. (36)

And thus, even though this arrangement was slightly exploitational,

Babette Mangolte, along with many others who worked with Hanoun on
various projects, learned how to make films by working with an actual
practitioner, rather than in a school, acquiring skills that would enable
her to create her own work later on.
Between 1970 and 1980, in addition to serving as a lecturer at the
University of Paris in 1976, Hanoun toured and lectured in the United
States and Europe, screening his films and discussing them with
students. This, of course, was a very different time in American society,
in which political cinema—often of great difficulty—was embraced by
students who now seek only to escape from their lives in manufactured
entertainments. In addition, Hanoun also wrote a great deal of film
theory and criticism, always seeking to move away from the establish-
ment, but again, nearly all of this material has never been translated
into English.
As Hanoun began working in video more aggressively in the
last decades of his life on a wide variety of projects, many of them

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 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s

collaborations, his works became “fugitive texts,” some of them lost,

incomplete, or made in formats, such as Super 8mm, that are no
longer supported by current technology. While it’s nice to see some of
Hanoun’s work on the web, a DVD box set of his best work is long
overdue, but since there isn’t even one available in Europe, it’s doubtful
that this will ever happen. All the time, he continued to work, creating
one of the most compelling later projects, Jeanne, Aujourd’hui (Joan,
Today, 2000) using the most minimal of resources—indeed, many crit-
ics observed that no matter how reduced his personal circumstances,
Hanoun lived to make movies..
Nevertheless, Hanoun was still honored, if not revered, in France, and
was given a retrospective in 1994 at the Musée du Jeu de Paume, followed
by a long overdue career retrospective at the Cinémathèque Française
from 28 April to 31 May 2010, showcasing a large number of his films
and videos; by that time, Hanoun, like Agnès Varda, had turned almost
exclusively to working in small format video, as the most congenial and
least compromised medium in which to create his works. It’s nice to see
that just two years before his death, the Cinémathèque finally allowed
Hanoun some small measure of recognition; it’s too bad, however, that
they could not have stepped in earlier.
Marcel Hanoun’s cinema was simultaneously confrontational and
invitational, asking the viewer to do a great deal of work with the images
presented, but offering also, as with the films of Manoel de Oliveira, a
vision that at once confounds and enlightens his audience. Unlike so
many other filmmakers, indeed nearly every other filmmaker with a
major reputation working in France during this period, Hanoun never
really sought out publicity, and consciously rejected the commercial
model of filmmaking even when it was in his grasp.
Like Straub and Huillet, Hanoun wanted to challenge his audience,
to force them to abandon their recreational expectations, and embrace
a cinema that dealt in revolutionary truths and a terrible beauty, borne
of a conscious rejection of the material, and as with all artists who
work from the margins, it cost him dearly. Yet Hanoun could not have
worked any differently. His relative “invisibility,” then, alluded to at
the beginning of this chapter, is something that Hanoun consistently,
it seems to me, sought and accepted. He could easily have followed
a more commercial route if he had been a mere narrativist, but for
Hanoun, narrative was simply another aspect of the cinema that
existed to be deconstructed. For the moment, we should remember

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 The Invisible Cinema of Marcel Hanoun 

that his work is so much more than one film, one film which ultimately
and unjustly served to define him, one film whose reception shaped his
entire career, and one film which is just one of the many challenging
and dazzling films he created, films which demand our attention, and
continue to resonate in one’s memory long after the final images have
faded from the screen.

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 6
The Noir Vision of Max
Ophüls, Romantic Fatalist
Abstract: Max Ophüls, born Maximillian Oppenheimer on
6 May 1902, Saarbrücken, Germany, was a director known
primarily for his romance films, often with sweeping
tracking shots, and often taking place in the past. Ophüls’
luxurious camera style is evident in such superb romance
films as Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948). The
director made only two true noir films in his long and
distinguished career, back to back: Caught and The
Reckless Moment (both 1949) during his brief period in
the United States. These two noirs were a distinct departure
from his earlier work, and stand out as near aberrations
in the director’s body of work. But they were created out
of necessity, not design, for Ophüls never really wanted to
come to Hollywood in the first place.

Dixon, Wheeler Winston. Dark Humor in Films of the

1960s. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
doi: 10.1057/9781137562500.0009.

 DOI: 10.1057/9781137562500.0009
 The Noir Vision of Max Ophüls, Romantic Fatalist 

Max Ophüls, born Maximillian Oppenheimer on 6 May 1902,

Saarbrücken, Germany, was a director known primarily for his romance
films, often with sweeping tracking shots, and often taking place in the
past. Ophüls’ luxurious camera style is evident in such superb romance
films as Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), with Louis Jourdan as
Stefan Brand, a ne’er do well pianist who seduces and then abandons
a young woman, Lisa Berndle (Joan Fontaine), and pays for his crime
in a dueling match; La Ronde (1950), a sex comedy based on Arthur
Schnitzler’s eponymous play, in which lovers float from one affair to the
next with delightful abandon; Madame de . . . (1953), another romance
film in which a spoiled Countess (Danielle Darrieux) engages in an
extramarital dalliance, highlighted by Ophüls’ trademark “waltzing
camera” technique, and his penchant for long takes; and his final film,
the Technicolor and CinemaScope extravaganza Lola Montès (1955),
based on the life of a notorious courtesan who eventually winds up as
the main attraction in a circus sideshow.
Ophüls started directing films in 1931, scoring an early success with his
romantic drama Liebelei (1933), completing a total of 18 films in Germany
and France between 1931 and 1940. While these films, especially Liebelei,
gesture toward his later, more mature work, Ophüls was still establish-
ing himself. The director made only two true noir films in his long and
distinguished career, back to back: Caught and The Reckless Moment (both
1949) during his brief period in the United States. To this most European
and continental director, for whom romance was a sacred trust, with the
camera revealing the innermost workings of the hearts of his characters,
these two noirs were a distinct departure from his earlier work and stand
out as near aberrations in the director’s body of work. But they were
created out of necessity, not design, for Ophüls never really wanted to
come to Hollywood in the first place.
Like so many other gifted filmmakers of the era, Ophüls landed in
Hollywood during the 1940s much against his will, after fleeing from
Germany in 1933 to France in order to avoid the rising power of the Nazis.
As a Jew, Ophüls had good reason to fear Hitler’s regime, and although
he became a French citizen in 1938, when Paris fell to the Nazis in 1940,
Ophüls was forced to flee again, moving through Switzerland to Italy,
and arriving in the United States in 1941. Coming to the United States
was thus not a conscious decision to move to Hollywood; it was, rather,
an event necessitated by the simple desire to survive. Ophüls was simply
not an “organization man,” but rather an individualist who adapted very
uneasily to the American studio system.
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 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s

Already established as a director in Europe, and admired by the

cinematic cognoscenti in the United States, Ophüls nevertheless found
it impossible to get work in Hollywood until noir director Robert
Siodmak, another refugee from Hitler’s Germany, interceded on Ophüls’
behalf (see Keser, 2006), with the result being the decidedly peculiar The
Exile (1947), starring Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and the erstwhile “Queen
of Technicolor,” Maria Montez. This odd costume drama of the life and
loves of a courtesan, scripted by Fairbanks with an uncredited assist from
Aeneas MacKenzie and Clemence Dane, is almost a black-and-white dry
run for Ophüls’ final film, Lola Montes, but certainly can’t be qualified as
a noir.
The film was successful, however, and led to Letter from an Unknown
Woman (1948), a tragic romance for which Ophüls’ delicate sensibility
was uniquely qualified, and which remained his biggest American hit.
Even in this film, which certainly doesn’t qualify as an out and out noir,
destiny is tragic; promising pianist Stefan Brand squanders his career
with reckless extravagance and unrelenting womanizing. Brand is so
caught up in the trajectory of own unending search for momentary
pleasure that he ignores the genuine affection of Lisa, setting the stage
for both Lisa and Stefan’s premature death. Ophüls’ final two American
films were Caught and The Reckless Moment, both noirs, and both starring
James Mason, before Ophüls returned to Europe, and his true métier,
the period romance. Caught and The Reckless Moment are curious films,
unlike other American noirs of the period, and reminiscent in their
poetic approach to Jean Renoir’s hallucinatory and brilliant Woman on
the Beach (1947), another noir by a director fleeing the Third Reich.
Caught tells the story of a young and somewhat naive fashion model,
Leonora Ames (Barbara Bel Geddes), who impulsively and for reasons
that are never really made clear marries manic multimillionaire industri-
alist Smith Ohlrig (Robert Ryan). Signs of Ohlrig’s psychotic personality
are evident from his first appearance in the film, but Leonora, wrapped
up in her own dreams of romantic escape from her rather drab life,
doesn’t seem to notice. Almost immediately after the wedding, Ohlrig
begins acting in a highly possessive and abusive manner, and yet Leonora
stays with him, until finally she can stand no more, and walks out of
Ohlrig’s life and into an affair with Dr. Larry Quinada (Mason), who
works in a free health clinic in a rundown part of town. Dr. Quinada
is everything that Ohlrig is not: patient, kind, considerate, and altruis-
tic. Ohlrig is greed and brutality incarnate, and the most entertaining

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 The Noir Vision of Max Ophüls, Romantic Fatalist 

part of the film is watching Ryan devour his role with obvious relish,
playing up Ohlrig’s megalomania for all its worth. Caught was a modest
success, enhanced considerably by Lee Garmes’ atmospheric lighting,
and Ophüls’ incessantly dollying camerawork, which by this time had
become his trademark.
Caught was based on a novel by Libbie Block, which reportedly used
the film producer and aviator Howard Hughes as the basis for Ohlrig’s
ruthless, monomaniacal character. Here, the director was working at
least partially from personal experience. There was little love lost between
Ophüls and Hughes, as Hughes had fired Ophüls from the director’s
chair on the revenge melodrama Vendetta, which began filming under
Hughes’ supervision in 1946, but was not released until 1950. Amazingly,
directors Preston Sturges, Stuart Heisler, Mel Ferrer, and Hughes himself
all took turns helming sections of Vendetta, which opened to disastrous
reviews and negligible box office.
Mason was toplined in Ophüls’ next production, The Reckless Moment,
appearing opposite noir stalwart Joan Bennett. Produced by Bennett’s
husband, Walter Wanger, The Reckless Moment tells the rather improbable
tale of Lucia Harper (Bennett), who becomes tangled in a web of lies
and deceit when she tries to cover up for her daughter, Bea (Geraldine
Fitzgerald), whom she believes to be guilty of the murder of her sleazy
boyfriend Ted Darby (Shepperd Strudwick). Ted is a complete cad; he’s
so thoroughly rotten that he actually tells Lucia that he’ll drop Bea in
return for a cash consideration, but Lucia refuses to pay him. Lucia then
tells Bea of Ted’s request, but Bea refuses to believe her. That night, Ted
clandestinely meets Bea in the family boathouse. When Bea confronts
him with Lucia’s story, Ted casually admits the truth of it, and Bea takes
a swipe at him with a heavy flashlight, grazing him. Bea runs away, but
Ted makes a wrong turn coming out of the boathouse, and falls off the
landing, fatally impaling himself on an anchor.
The next morning, Lucia discovers the body, and disposes of both
it and the anchor in the bay. Ted’s body’s is eventually found, but with
nothing to link Bea or Lucia to the corpse, Lucia thinks she’s managed to
cover up her daughter’s “crime.” But Bea and Ted had been carrying on a
correspondence, and the love letters fall into the hands of confidence man
Martin Donnelly (Mason), who tries to blackmail Lucia. But, in the odd
sort of twist that could happen only in the films of an incurable romantic
like Ophüls, Donnelly finds himself falling in love with Lucia, and thinks
better of the idea. Even more peculiarly, Donnelly finds himself attracted

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 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s

to Lucia because she apparently—or so he says—resembles his mother.

However, Donnelly’s silent partner, the mysterious Nagle (veteran
supporting actor Roy Roberts, in a standout performance), unmoved by
Donnelly’s change of heart, emerges from the shadows to demand the
cash from Lucia.
Outraged, Donnelly summarily murders Nagel, and then stuffs Nagel’s
body into his car and flees, before deliberately crashing the car into a
fence post. Lucia follows Donnelly to the crash scene and with his dying
breath, Donnelly returns Bea and Ted’s letters to Lucia. When the police
arrive on the scene, Donnelly, with his last breath, “confesses” to Ted’s
murder. Lucia, it seems, can now return to her life as it was before. Both
films were modest successes, but neither had the box-office clout of
Letter from an Unknown Woman, and despite his best intentions, Ophüls
was never cut out to be a Hollywood contract director. In both films, the
action moves along as if all the characters are in a dream, and Ophüls’
luxuriant and deeply romantic camerawork seems almost at odds with
the material, as if he’s standing back from the action and observing it,
rather than participating in the world his characters inhabit.
Ophüls is simply not at home in Hollywood, seemingly forcing his own
vision into films that in the hands of other, more resigned or quotidian
genre craftsmen would have become simple exercises in melodrama. As
always, Ophüls covers most of the film’s action in a series of lengthy, fluid
tracking shots, which only adds to the peculiarly hallucinatory nature of
both films. Indeed, James Mason, amused at how many tracking shots
both films contained, famously composed a brief poem in honor of
Ophüls’ stylistic penchant, which reads:
A shot that does not call for tracks
Is agony for poor old Max,
Who, separated from his dolly,
Is wrapped in deepest melancholy.
Once, when they took away his crane,
I thought he’d never smile again.

Ophüls knew a great deal about the dark side of human nature, as his
many romantic tragedies amply demonstrate. But he was not a truly noir
director; rather, he was a romantic from another era who took these two
projects on as work that he could do, and get paid for. He then imme-
diately decamped to Europe with the proceeds, determined to make
the sort of films he’d made his reputation with, before the Nazis came

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 The Noir Vision of Max Ophüls, Romantic Fatalist 

to power. And, indeed, these American films form a curious interlude

in the director’s career as a whole; he was much more at home in the
continental atmosphere of turn-of-the-century Europe, and never really
comfortable with the modern world.
Ophüls would live until 1957, and make only four more films; they are
among the most sublime in cinema history: La Ronde, Le Plaisir, Madame
de . . . , and Lola Montès. These are films of passionate romance, a world
away from the two American noirs Ophüls created, which remain pecu-
liarly his own, a mixture of passion and old-world style. And yet even
in these films, human weakness, failure of character, and the caprices of
fate play an undeniable role; in Lola Montès, as noted earlier, the leading
character (played by Martine Carol) is reduced to reliving her scandalous
career as a circus sideshow attraction, under the exploitational guidance
of ringmaster Peter Ustinov, who presents her as a “freak,” out of touch
with the world, trapped by her own past.
Never in the best of health, Ophüls died at the age of 54 of heart
failure; his films represent a splendid embrace of style, romance, energy,
and an embrace of the past, particularly nineteenth-century Vienna. As
the on-screen narrator (Anton Walbrook) of La Ronde tells the audience
directly (breaking the fourth wall) during the opening minutes of the
film, “I adore the past. It is so much more restful than the present, and
so much more certain than the future.” This sums up Ophüls’ approach
to life, and to the cinema, in one elegant, epigrammatic phrase. Ophüls’
noirs are certainly “detours” in his overall career, more romantic than
sinister, but they offer an interesting example of a continental director
working in an American genre, and shaping it to his own ends—making
films that, as with the best of all art, transcend the limitations of their
commercial demands.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137562500.0009
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DOI: 10.1057/9781137562500.0010
 Index
action films, 36, 37, 40–2, 44–5,
53, 56
Addams, Charles, 10, 11
Adventure in Iraq (film), 53, 62
Axelrod, George, 2, 20–1
“B” films, 42, 46, 52, 55, 77
Babo 73 (film), 29
Beaudine, William, 57, 65
Bedazzled (film), 2, 26
big-budget films, 6, 11, 36, 58,
78
Billington, Kevin, 2, 30
black/sick comedy, see dark
comedy
Brooks, Mel, 2, 26–7
Bruce, Lenny, 2, 7–8
A Bucket of Blood (film), 2–5
call sheets, 37
camerawork/camera style, 11,
18, 20, 33, 34, 37, 40, 42,
44, 49, 67, 83, 89, 91, 92
Captain Midnight (teleseries),
34, 57
Carmenta, Johnny, 67, 69
cartoons, 2–3, 10, 54
Castle, William, 2, 9–11, 54
Caught (noir film), 89, 90–1
Chafed Elbows (film), 29
Chamberlain, William, 7
churros, 66
Cohn, Harry, 40, 44, 53–4
Columbia Pictures, 11, 18, 33,
40–4, 46, 52–5
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comedians, 2, 7–8, 10, 11
comedy
dark/black, see dark comedy
horror, 4–6, 9–11, 65
nihilistic, 7, 9, 31
political, 2, 14–18, 24–5
radical, 28–9
romantic, 22–3
sex, 12–14, 89
sick, 7, 8, 31, see also “sick”
humor
stand-up, 2
contract directors, 33, 55, 92
Corman, Roger, 2–6, 68, 70
Cummings, Irving, 33, 56
Dance Hall Racket (noir film),
7–8
Dangerfield, Rodney, 7
A Dangerous Adventure (film),
45
dark comedy
artistes, 30
critique of, 4, 10, 20, 24, 25
death and, 18–19
essence of, 7
in the 1950s, 7–9
in the 1960s, 2–7, 9–31
waning of, 26, 28–31
“Daughter of the Sioux”, 59
A Dog of the Regiment (film),
37, 40–1
Donen, Stanley, 2, 26
Downey, Robert Sr., 2,
28–9

 Index
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to
Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
(film), 2, 14–18
El Fantástico Mundo De Juan Orol
(film), 68–70
El fantástico mundo de los hippies (film),
68, 70
El sendero gris (film), 67
End of the Trail (film), 42
Escape from Crime (film), 50–2, 62
Fail Safe (film), 17–18
Feiffer, Jules, 2–3
Flicker, Theodore J., 2, 24–5
French cinema, 80–7
see also Hanoun, Marcel
gangster films, 11, 53, 65, 67–70
Gángsters contra charros (film), 67–8
genre cinema/genre filmmaking, 33
action, 36, 37, 40–2, 44–5, 53, 56
comedy, 45, 52, 53
crime, 33, 43–6, 48–52, 53–4, 56
melodrama, 43, 44, 52–3, 65, 67, 91,
92
mystery, 43, 46–50, 52, 54–5, 58
program, 33, 42, 44, 46, 52–4, 60
romance, 45, 89–93
silent, 33, 36, 37, 40, 41, 67
sound, 41
Western, 33, 41–3, 46, 65
George, Peter, 14, 17–18
Godard, Jean-Luc, 65, 80
Gold Diggers of Broadway (film), 36, 56
Griffith, Charles B., 3–6
Griffith, D. W., 36, 37
Hamer, Robert, 8
Hammer Films, 9, 10–11
Hanoun, Marcel
critique of films of, 81–2, 84–5
death of, 80
early life of, 82–3
as a filmmaker, 80, 82–7
films of, 80, 82–6
obituary for, 80–1
A Hard Day’s Night (film), 13, 14
Hell Ship Morgan (film), 44–5
Honrarás a tus padres (film), 67
horror films, 4–6, 9–11, 65
House on Haunted Hill (film), 9
Hudson, David, 80–1
I’ll Never Forget What’s ’is Name (film),
2, 23–4
I’m All Right Jack (film), 2, 9
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (film),
2, 11–12
Jenkins, William O., 66, 69
Jones, James Earl, 16–17
Kind Hearts and Coronets (film), 8
The Knack . . . and How to Get It (film),
2, 12–14
Kramer, Stanley, 2, 11, 12
Kubrick, Stanley, 2, 14–18
L’authentique procès de Carl-Emmanuel
Jung (film), 83–4
The Ladykillers (film), 8–9
Le Printemps (film), 84
Lederman, David Ross
as an action specialist, 36, 37, 40–2,
44–5, 53, 56
as an assistant director, 36–7, 38
as an associate producer, 57–8
camera setups of, 33, 34, 37, 40, 42,
44, 49
childhood and early life of, 34–6
as codirector, 52, 55–6
critique of working style of, 34, 36–7,
42–3, 44
daughter of, see Neville, Joan
death of, 60
as a director in films, 40–56
as a director in television, 56–7, 58–9
as an economical filmmaker, 33, 34,
41, 42, 49, 51, 52, 59
entry into motion picture business,
36–7
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Lederman, David Ross – continued
parents of, 34–5
personal life of, 37–40, 53–4, 60–2
personality of, 33–4, 40, 60–2
uniqueness in filmmaking, 33–4,
62–3
see also genre cinema/genre
filmmaking
Lederman, Luke, 34
Lederman, Marcella, 37–9
Liebelei (film), 89
Lester, Richard, 2, 12–14, 24
L’été (film), 84
Letter from an Unknown Woman (film),
89, 90, 92
The Little Shop of Horrors (film), 2, 4,
5–6
Lola Montès (film), 90, 93
Lord Love a Duck (film), 2, 20–2
Los Angeles Times (newspaper), 37, 38, 39
The Loved One (film), 2, 18–20
low-budget films, 3–4, 6, 27, 41, 42, 52,
59, 66
Lumet, Sidney, 17
Mackendrick, Alexander, 8
Madre querida (film), 67, 68, 69
Mangolte, Babette, 85
Mascot Pictures, 41–2, 53
McCarey, Leo, 62
McCoy, Tim, 42–3
Mexican cinema, 65–71
see also Orol, Juan
Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment
(film), 2, 22–3
“Mother Lederman”, 34–5
My Son John (film), 62
Neville, Joan, 33, 35, 39, 40, 60–3
The New York Times (newspaper), 10, 81
Newman, Barry, 73, 76–8
nihilism, 7, 9, 31, 52, 73
noir films, 7, 69, 89–93
The Old Dark House (film), 2, 9–11
Ophüls, Max, 89–93
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Index 
Orol, Juan
as an actor, 67, 68
as a director, 65–8, 70–1
death of, 68
early life of, 66–7
as an exponent of gangster films,
67–8
film biography of, 68–70
and variety in filmmaking, 67–8
Overland Trail (teleseries), 59
The Phantom of the West (serial), 41–2
Pickens, Slim, 15, 16, 17
Pogel, Nancy, 7
The President’s Analyst (film),
2, 24–5
Priestley, J. B., 10, 11
The Producers (film), 2, 26–7
program films, 33, 42, 44, 46, 52–4, 60
Putney Swope (film), 2, 28–9
The Reckless Moment (noir film), 89,
90, 91–2
Red Alert (novel), 14, 18
Reisz, Karel, 2, 22
The Return of the Whistler (film), 54–5
Richardson, Tony, 2, 18, 20
Rin-Tin-Tin films, 36–7, 41
Ring of Fear (film), 57–8
The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer
(film), 2, 30
Ross, Laura Pauline, see “Mother
Lederman”
Ruth, Roy Del, 33, 36, 55, 56
Sahl, Mort, 2
Sarafian, Richard C., 73 77–8
Sellers, Peter, 8, 9, 14–16, 20
Sennett, Mack, 36, 39, 60
Shotgun Slade (teleseries), 58–9
“sick” humor, 2–8, 10, 26
Sick, Sick, Sick (cartoon), 2–3
silent films, 33, 36, 37, 40, 41, 67
Soldiers of the Storm (film), 42–3
Sosa, Roberto, 69, 70
Springtime for Hitler (play), 27
 Index

stand-up comedy, 2, 7–8 Warner Bros., 33, 36–7, 39–44, 46,

Strange Alibi (film), 46–50, 52, 62 52–6, 67
Southern, Terry, 14, 18 Warner, Jack, 40, 52, 68
Wayne, John, 16, 41, 42,
The Tanks Are Coming (film), 55–6 58, 60
Tucker, Phil, 7 Wexler, Haskell, 18–20
Whale, James, 10
Un Simple Histoire (film), 80–3 Winner, Michael, 2, 23–4
Wood, Ed, 65, 69
Vanishing Point (film), 73–8
Variety (newspaper), 4, 36, 56, 60 Zanuck, Darryl F., 40,
The Village Voice (newspaper), 3, 73, 81 56, 78

DOI: 10.1057/9781137562500.0011