The Tall Texan

The same year Elmo Williams won an Academy Award for editing HIGH NOON, he made his directing debut with another western, which was partially filmed at City of Rocks State Park in New Mexico. Hiring a trio of then-blacklisted performers — Lloyd Bridges (SEA HUNT), Lee J. Cobb (OUR MAN FLINT), Luther Adler (D.O.A.) — as well as Marie Windsor (THE NARROW MARGIN), all of whom shared an agent, Williams shot THE TALL TEXAN in eight days with Elizabeth Reinhardt (LAURA) typing new dialogue during production.

With its genesis in an original screenplay by Sam Roeca (ANGEL BABY), THE TALL TEXAN stars Bridges as a convicted murderer being escorted by sheriff Samuel Herrick to an El Paso prison aboard a covered wagon. The wagon is attacked by Indians, who kill one of the passengers and overturn the wagon. Stranded in the desert without horses, Bridges, Herrick, and the other survivors, who include sea captain Cobb, Eastern widow Windsor, driver Syd Saylor (THE THREE MESQUITEERS), and Indian George Steele (BADMEN OF THE WEST), team up with trader Adler to investigate an alleged gold cache.

Suffice to say, many of them come down with a wicked case of gold fever, even the sheriff, who neglects his duties in taking in Bridges. The emphasis is on drama over action in this agreeable B-picture with more than a little debt to TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE. Bridges and Cobb predictably clash over the only woman in the group. Whether the short schedule or Williams’ status as a first-time director is to blame, the movie suffers from occasional sloppiness, such as the tire tracks of the camera car consistently getting into the shot. Though the film establishes Bridges’ conviction earlier, later dialogue calls for Bridges to continue to El Paso to stand trial (Reinhardt probably has to take the hit for this).

On the other hand, Williams served as his own editor and cut the picture to a tight 81 minutes. He does a nice job moving the camera to spice up the visuals, and uses his barren New Mexican locations to good advantage. The blacklisted stars appear to relish their roles at a time when they weren’t getting many. Cobb and Bridges cooperated with the House Un-American Activities Committee and resumed their careers.

The Tall T

Elmore Leonard’s “The Captive” is the basis for this tough western, one of many collaborations between director Budd Boetticher and star Randolph Scott. Filmed at Lone Pine, California, THE TALL T was the first Leonard property to be turned into a motion picture. The prolific Burt Kennedy (SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL SHERIFF) wrote the screenplay, which is one of those thrillers that cast the hero and the villain as two sides of a coin. With Kennedy’s words and the fine actors speaking them, however, the “we’re a lot alike, you and I” trope doesn’t feel cliched.

Scott is, of course, the hero, a bull-riding rancher traveling on a stagecoach with driver Arthur Hunnicutt (CAT BALLOU) and newlyweds John Hubbard (BIG JIM MCLAIN) and Maureen O’Sullivan. Now, O’Sullivan the actress was a gorgeous woman — check out those old MGM Tarzan movies — but she is dressed down here to play a plain woman, the daughter of a millionaire whose husband married her for her money...and she knows it.

All are waylaid at the nearest relay station by three hard men played by Skip Homeier (CRY VENGEANCE), Henry Silva (THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE), and Richard Boone (THE SHOOTIST), the leader. Boone is flat-out brilliant as the cold, intellectual leader, a Bizarro Paladin who just wants enough money to buy a little piece of land, which is also Scott’s goal.

That’s just one of the similarities between the Scott and Boone characters brought out in THE TALL T. Kennedy’s plot may be routine B-movie fare you could find in any Wild Bill Elliott second feature for Monogram, but the characters aren’t. They’re mature and complex, and the actors give them a lived-in quality that vaults the film above most other 1950s westerns. A terse exchange just after Boone and Scott meet in which Boone asks Scott if he knows what’s going to happen to him says as much about their characters as twenty minutes of backstory.

Except for some ill-conceived slapstick near the beginning, Boetticher’s western classic is a taut, uncompromising thriller in the Elmore Leonard tradition. It was the second of seven westerns that teamed Scott with the director. All are worth watching, and THE TALL T is among the best of them.

Night Of Bloody Horror

Yes, that’s Emmy-winning star Gerald McRaney of SIMON & SIMON, DEADWOOD, MAJOR DAD, HOUSE OF CARDS, and THIS IS US fame making his film debut in NIGHT OF BLOODY HORROR. Then a local New Orleans actor cast by the aunt of executive producer Albert Salzer (NIGHT OF THE STRANGLER), McRaney plays young Wesley Stewart, whose lady friends have a nasty habit of getting dead around him.

Shot in “Violent Vision,” which represents the psychedelic blue swirls surrounding McRaney during his periodic headaches, the film opens with Wesley and Susan (Lisa Dameron presenting the requisite bare breasts) finishing up a roll in the sack. Several slowly paced minutes later, Susan is stabbed in the face while giving confession!

The bikinied body of Wesley’s next girlfriend, a nurse named Kay (Charlotte White) who dragged his drunk ass home one night after he was mugged outside a bar, takes a fatal axe to the chest. Not that two murdered girlfriends and a trip to the cop shop prevent a pretty reporter (Gaye Yellen) from asking him out to a bar to watch a groovy (real) band called The Bored.

Directed by Joy N. Houck Jr. for his father’s Howco International outfit, NIGHT OF BLOODY TERROR is dreadful but watchable, if only for McRaney and Houck’s earnest attempts to be hip. Besides the psychedelic pinwheels, Houck adds fast zooms and solarized effects to The Board’s number while McRaney punches the hell out of a bully. The fight choreography is as bad as the photography and particularly the sound, which was recorded on Louisiana locations with poor acoustics. If you’ve seen PSYCHO — and if you’re reading this, you have — you’ll suss out what’s happening.

The skinny McRaney (who is shirtless a lot) gives a credible performance — he obviously took the role seriously — though you wouldn’t have predicted he’d have the career he did. To his credit, in his later years, he didn’t put NIGHT OF BLOODY HORROR down. McRaney did another movie for Houck, WOMEN AND BLOODY TERROR, before moving to Los Angeles and working regularly in episodic television until landing the co-lead on SIMON & SIMON in 1981.

The Prince

Jason Patric (RUSH) is The Prince in this dreary direct-to-video crime meller courtesy of dreary direct-to-video director Brian A. Miller (VICE). At least The Prince is what mechanic Patric (with remarkably clean hands) used to be called in the old days when he was a professional assassin.

Now retired with daughter Gia Mantegna (THE FROZEN GROUND) away at college, Patric is pulled back into his old life John Wick-style when his junkie daughter leaves college to hook up with New Orleans drug kingpin 50 Cent (ESCAPE PLAN). While bashing his way through the underworld in search of Mantegna, Patric gains the attention of Bruce Willis (DIE HARD), a big-time mobster still seething from the deaths of his wife and child by Patric’s hand twenty years earlier, the result of a hit gone awry that led Patric to retire.

The plot by SAN ANDREAS writers Andre Fabrizio and Jeremy Passmore is ridiculous. For some reason, Patric drags along his daughter’s cokehead friend Jessica Lowndes (90210) to New Orleans so she can “point out” where to find a drug dealer, but all she had to do was tell him the name of a bar. Willis tells his goons to bring him The Prince alive, yet their strategy is to immediately shoot at him. But the biggest flaw is that Willis’ character doesn’t seem like a heavy. After all, he’s just looking to enact revenge against the hitman who murdered his wife and daughter, which would make him the hero in almost any other movie.

Miller has no idea how to shoot an action sequence. It’s pretty easy for Patric to shoot down a dozen bad guys when they stand right out in the open or run straight at a concealed target. John Cusack (THE SURE THING), of all people, shows up for a few scenes backing up his old pal Patric, “Jung Ji-Hoon aka Rain” (which is how he’s billed) does some kung fu, Johnathon Schaech (THE THING YOU DO) cameos in a gun shop, and the palpably disinterested Willis, who makes no effort to change his appearance in scenes set twenty years apart, never left his Mobile hotel (better tax breaks in Alabama than Louisiana) to shoot his scenes.

George Peppard is Banacek in Detour To Nowhere

Movie star George Peppard (THE CARPETBAGGERS) turned to network television in the fall of 1972 as BANACEK, which rotated with Richard Widmark’s MADIGAN and James Farentino’s COOL MILLION under NBC’s WEDNESDAY MYSTERY MOVIE banner. Before that, however, Peppard gave the character of Thomas Banacek, a proudly Polish freelance investigator based in Boston, a test run in DETOUR TO NOWHERE, an acceptable pilot movie directed by Jack Smight, with whom Peppard had worked on THE THIRD DAY and would work again on DAMNATION ALLEY.

BANACEK’s gimmick, introduced in this pilot written by series creator Anthony Wilson (LOST IN SPACE), is the “impossible crime,” akin to the classic locked-door mystery. Banacek is called in to investigate the baffling theft or disappearance of an expensive item. In DETOUR TO NOWHERE, the object is an armored car carrying nearly $2 million in gold that vanishes from a desert highway, its drivers left dead at the bottom of a cliff with no trace of the vehicle. Obstacles between Banacek and the mystery’s solution include corrupt sheriff Don Dubbins (THE ILLUSTRATED MAN), grinning tycoon Ed Nelson (PEYTON PLACE), and rival investigator Christine Belford (TO KILL A COP).

The pilot was clouded with controversy. During location shooting in Boston, a 24-year-old female extra accused Peppard of rape. He was eventually cleared in court of all charges. Also, KNBC, Los Angeles’ NBC affiliate, threatened to not air the pilot because guest star Ed Nelson was running for city council in San Dimas, California, and his opponents wanted air time under the equal time rule. Nelson withdrew from the race, and DETOUR TO NOWHERE aired on KNBC as scheduled.

Oscar-winning cinematographer Sam Leavitt (THE DEFIANT ONES) was nominated for an Emmy for his photography here (he lost to KUNG FU’s Jack Woolf). BANACEK was the only NBC WEDNESDAY MYSTERY MOVIE spoke to earn a second season, where it rotated with Dan Dailey’s FARADAY AND COMPANY, James McEachin’s TENAFLY, and Helen Hayes and Mildred Natwick’s THE SNOOP SISTERS. Belford, Ralph Manza as chauffeur Jay Drury, and Murray Matheson as bookstore owner Felix Mulholland made the jump from pilot to series with Peppard. Sixteen BANACEK episodes aired in total. Peppard, of course, found greater television success as the leader of THE A-TEAM.

The Snow Creature

From the father/son director/writer team who gave you KILLERS FROM SPACE, PHANTOM FROM SPACE, and MANFISH comes THE SNOW CREATURE. And because you’ve seen those other films by W. Lee Wilder and Myles Wilder — the great Billy Wilder’s brother and nephew, respectively — you know to stay the hell out of THE SNOW CREATURE’s way. Its only claim to fame is that it is the first American science fiction movie about the Abominable Snowman. It also holds the distinction of being the first American science fiction movie with an actor (reportedly Lock “Gort” Martin) inside a cheap-looking Abominable Snowman suit.

Probably the only Abominable Snowman (hell, I’m calling it a Yeti from here on — less typing) movie partially set in Southern California, THE SNOW CREATURE stars Paul Langton (patriarch of the Harrington family on PEYTON PLACE) as a scientist in charge of an expedition into the Himalayas. He scoffs when his Sherpa guide Teru Shimada (YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE) tells him Shimada’s wife has been kidnapped by a Yeti, so Shimada kidnaps the whole party at gunpoint and forces them to search for his wife. Of course, they find a whole family of them, but only one survives (see the title) to be taken KING KONG-style back to Los Angeles.

Here the movie bogs down (as if it hadn’t already) in an inexplicable subplot about governmental red tape as Customs and Immigration argue whether a frozen Yeti is cargo or a person. Nobody is interested in this — it’s hard to believe the Wilders did — and it would be a huge relief when the Yeti inevitably escapes to wreak havoc in L.A., except the Yeti scenes are so cheap and boring. The creature is tall, but too slight of build to raise fear on its own, and W. Lee uses the same dull shot of it walking out of the dark toward the camera many times, even in reverse.

Oddly, climactic scenes of policemen (including FIVE’s William Phipps) chasing the creature through Los Angeles’ storm drains bring to mind THEM!, another 1954 release. Langton, who provides narration throughout, is a dull leading man, as if a more exciting one would have saved this movie. United Artists gave it a theatrical release.

The Frozen Dead

I don’t know if Herbert J. Leder is the only filmmaker to write, produce, and direct a Warner Brothers double bill, but I feel safe saying he is the worst. Both THE FROZEN DEAD and IT, a killer Golem movie starring Roddy McDowall, were filmed in color by Leder in Great Britain, but released in the United States in black and white.

Dana Andrews — a long way from LAURA — stars in THE FROZEN DEAD as a Nazi mad scientist in London twenty years after the fall of the Third Reich. Undeterred, Andrews moves forward with his heady scheme to rejuvenate the 1500 Nazi soldiers he placed in suspended animation during the war. Unfortunately, their brains don’t work, leaving Andrews with drooling idiots in full Nazi uniforms stinking up his lab (one of them is played by Edward Fox, future star of THE DAY OF THE JACKAL).

To Andrews’ and Leder’s credit, everything is played completely straight. Even the mere hint of camp would have made this material insufferable rather than silly. Though Leder’s direction is unexceptional, some of his images are indelible: a trio of Nazis hanging in a meat locker awaiting eventual reanimation, a wall of dangling arms (foreshadowing!), the decapitated but still living head of a young woman (Kathleen Breck) who can somehow communicate psychically with her best friend Anna Palk (THE SKULL), Andrews’ innocent niece.

No matter how many times filmmakers attempt it (here’s looking at you, THE BRAIN THAT WOULDN’T DIE), a disembodied talking head on a tray is impossible to take seriously (which is why the great RE-ANIMATOR didn’t try), and who knows what Andrews was thinking in his scenes with Breck. Too static and talky to work as a thriller, THE FROZEN DEAD wins points for its ridiculous premise and Andrews’ professionalism, but not enough points to recommend.