I’ve been tagged on Facebook by several friends to participate in that “15 Movies That Stuck With Me” meme but I haven’t yet jumped in. Clever Me (as opposed to Regular Me) has made the executive decision not to play the game on Facebook but to do it here and call it work. And so, without any further ado, I present my list of “15 Movies That Have Stuck With Me.”
THE RULES: List 15 movies you’ve seen that will always stick with you. Don’t think about it too long. Spend no more than 15 minutes. List the first films that you can recall.
Here goes nothing… 
1. THE OMEGA MAN (d. Boris Sagal, 1971). No surprise this should top my list, as I used star Charlton Heston so decoratively above. Heston was a huge hero of mine when I was a kid, even when he starred as flawed and fragile protagonists, as in NUMBER ONE (1969) or EARTHQUAKE (1974). I guess I related to his struggle. He wasn’t a he-man, he wasn’t John Wayne (who I also loved), he wasn’t the smartest guy in the world, but he was often the last guy in the world. This very loose adaptation of Richard Matheson’s hugely-influential novel I Am Legendisn’t a great movie by any stretch of the imagination but it was a favorite of mine when I was a fat brat and I must have seen it 20 times on regular TV. Years before I ever saw George Romero’s NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968), also influenced by Matheson (by way of the novel’s first adaptation, THE LAST MAN ON EARTH), this was my first “bug-in” movie, where the hero or heroes barricade and defend against the Unholy Whatever. There’s probably more of Heston’s hard-assed, intractable Robert Neville in me than I care to admit.
2. BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES (d. Ted Post, 1970). And speak of the Devil. Here’s Chuck Heston again, down and out in enemy territory, past the point of no return and about to put the plug on humanity and apeanity. Spoilers are unavoidable when you talk about this first sequel to PLANET OF THE APES (1968) in large part because the end is really the only thing worth talking about. Born as I was in 1961 and of the age to walk by myself to the movies, I saw a lot of sequels before I ever saw the originals. I’m fairly certain I saw all of the “apes” movies before I ever clapped eyes on the best of the bunch, which is why I have a soft spot for these arguably inferior follow-ups. The conclusion of BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES was a jawdropper for us 9 year-olds in the audience. We didn’t know the movies were allowed to do that to us and we stumbled out of the kiddie matinee into the harsh light of day changed people. I still hold this game-changer in high regard.
3. BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID (d. George Roy Hill, 1969) was one of those rare movies, in my experience, which put adults and kids in the same room. Everybody went to go see this back in the day and given the free pass to my local bijou that I got from my father being the principal of the local high school I’m pretty sure I saw it five or six times. It was also the first screenplay I ever read, as William Goldman’s script was published in book form, and fairly begging for me to pull lit off of the paperback rack of my local newsstand. It’s safe to say that BUTCH CASSIDY… was the first movie I ever studied, the first one where I became aware of camera angles and choice of film stock — the concluding frames, in which the protagonists face off with the Bolivian Army, and the film freezes and sepias out may even have been inspired by the previous year’s NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, who knows? — and it was the first movie whose dialogue I ever quoted.
4. OPERATION CROSSBOW (d. Michael Anderson, 1965). If you’ve seen this all the way to its end, you may be sensing a pattern. My Mom was a huge George Peppard fan, so we would watch all of his movies as a family when they turned up on TV. I’m sure my folks went into this one thinking it was another GUNS OF NAVARONE (1961) and in a way it is… a men-on-a-mission movie where the target is a Nazi installation, whose destruction or disabling is key to an Allied victory. But unlike that earlier Greg Peck feel-good classic where you wrap it up saying “Yay for our team,” this one is a grisly blood bath where you don’t know what the hell you feel by the end of it. Sophia Loren turns up halfway through this thing (as I remember it) as the wife of the German soldier that hero George Peppard is pretending to be and the culmination of her particular character arc still shocks me to this day. I always laugh a little at the “15 Movies” lists my 40-something friends put together and how sculpted they were as kids by STAR WARS (1977) and RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (1981) and DIE HARD (1988), which are like Doris Day movies compared to the stuff I cut my teeth on. I’m not saying my movies were better — I like those later movies, too — but if you grew up in the shadow of the 3 Ms — My Lai/Manson/Munich — you knew not to expect too much from life and hoped to make some small difference before the bastards cut you down.
5. THE BIRDS (d. Alfred Hitchcock, 1963). My Mom was also a big Rod Taylor fan, which is no doubt how I came to see THE BIRDS; in retrospect, however, this would probably be categorized by my family as one of my movies, being another obvious inspiration for — that title again – NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, with Taylor breaking up furniture and boarding up windows and blonde heroine Tippi Hedren going all catatonic and helpless. I was about to say that the ending of THE BIRDS breaks the run of movies for me in which the heroes die but the best that can be said about the final fade out here is that it is inconclusive. The surviving protagonists load into a (sadly impractical for apocalyptic motoring) sports car and head toward an uncertain future. We are offered no guarantee, nor any hint, that these people will survive.
6. CHUKA (d. Gordon Douglas, 1967). I’m not crazy. I don’t see echoes of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD in every movie… but I do believe that CHUKA, a 1967 frontier tale starring and produced by Rod Taylor, is a dry run for that George Romero classic, pitting a fort full of disparate characters against one another while starving Native Americans mass outside the walls and attack when our heroes are at their most distracted and vulnerable. Roger Ebert wrote a now-famous (and, in some circles, infamous) article about attending a kid’s matinee at which NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD was projected to an audience of wholly unprepared children. I didn’t catch that show but it was pretty much the same trauma parceled out with the Chuckles and Nickle Nips for those of us who saw CHUKA that Saturday afternoon. It’s a horror movie in a cowboy hat and the ending is yet again somewhat ambiguous… but only for the remaining 1% of the character roster whom we haven’t seen die graphically and horribly before our very eyes. Cowboy matinees practically made Hollywood but it was a whole new shootin’ match by 1967. Happy trails? Oh hell no.
7. HELL IS FOR HEROES (d. Don Siegel, 1962). I saw this most anti- of anti-war films at such a tender age that I can’t remember which of the actors in it were a lure for me. I’m pretty sure I had only vague notions of who star Steve McQueen was (I wouldn’t see THE BLOB or BULLIT for many years but THE GREAT ESCAPE was just around the corner for me) and I had only seen James Coburn in CHARADE (1963), which just misses making the cut here. I certainly knew who Fess Parker was, as I was a big DANIEL BOONE fan, but I really don’t know… all I know is that this thing scarred me as if it had shattered a napalm tank on my back. Lots of Hollywood movies get the rep for saying what war is really like — I know that Sam Fuller liked to think he was the only one telling it like it is — but all I had to see was actor Mike Kellin’s horrific (but not graphic) demise in HELL IS FOR HEROES to know that combat was not for me.
8. HORNET’S NEST (d. Phil Karlson, 1970). Another Saturday matinee, another descent into the maelstrom. In this US-Italian co-production, paratrooper Rock Hudson loses his squadron and has to form a mercenary army from a bunch of Italian kids whose parents have been executed by the Gestapo. It’s like something Edward Dmytryk would have directed in the Forties, albeit shoved through the meatgrinder of 70s permissiveness, meaning there’s a lot more flesh and blood on hand here. What I really remember, though, is the sweating. Everybody is sweaty in this and Hudson spends most of the running time in a government issue white-beater and it looks like someone was keeping his biceps oiled between takes. HORNET’S NEST isn’t another HELL IS FOR HEROES, though the logline is essentially the same. (“Find enemy installation. Destroy it. Try not to die.” Rather, it’s the selective slaughter of our protagonists that makes the ending a gutpunch and the implied loss of something much more elusive than life itself.
9. THE LOSERS (d. Jack Starrett, 1970). My sister Lisa’s first husband, Harry, was a mechanic and a motorcycle enthusiast, so I spent a lot of the early-to-mid Seventies at the drive-in watching biker flicks. I don’t know if THE LOSERS was one of them — I may have subsequently watched it myself on late night TV — but my passion for cinematic chrome and hot leather definitely sprang from that addition (albeit brief) to the family. THE LOSERS is another men-on-a-mission movie, with the twist being that the squad pressed into service in Vietnam to return a captured politician is made up of the members of a motorcycle game (led by William Smith and Adam Roarke). The inclusion of THE LOSERS into this company is the result of a mental coin toss, as the presence of Roarke as the film’s ostensible leading man (oh, but Starrett has a trick up his sleeve there) brings to mind DIRTY LARRY, CRAZY MARY (1974), which featured Roarke, and RACE WITH THE DEVIL
(1975), which starred Roarke’s DIRTY LARRY castmate Peter Fonda. These titles are pretty much interchangeable and they end the same — everybody dies. Welp, that was my childhood.
10. THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS (d. Roman Polanski, 1967). Knowing my preferences and predilections as many of you do, you’re probably surprised that we have gotten so far down on this list without one Gothic horror movie rearing its head… well, here you go. I saw this on late night TV multiple times as a boy and only ever caught up with it in its intended gauge and glory at a rep screening in New York’s East Village in 1990, a good twenty years past my first exposure to it. Talk about beguiling… ye gods, I miss being beguiled. This movie has magic and wonder, it’s funny and creepy as Hell; the cinematography of Douglas Slocombe (who, interestingly enough vis a vis my comments above, later show RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK and its sequels) is a view through the looking glass and the score by Krzysztof Komeda is an indelible symphony of terrors. (Confession: I own the soundtrack on CD and often sing along.) From the perspective of a horror-geek, this one was hugely influential and its sting-in-the tail was cadged by a number of subsequent horror movies, among them COUNT YORGA, VAMPIRE (1970) and the Spanish LA ORGIA DE LOS MUERTOS (d. Jose Luis Merino), aka THE HANGING WOMAN, aka RETURN OF THE ZOMBIES, aka a million other titles. I’ve shown this to my 9 year-old daughter, who loved it; as the movie proves, it’s all about sharing the good stuff.
11. THE MAGICIAN (d. Ingmar Bergman, 1958), aka ANSIKTET. There are a number of movies from my childhood that stick with me in fragments only… but, brother, what fragments! Like FLAMING STAR (another Don Siegel joint, from 1960), in which characters discuss burying the remains of the victims of a Kiowa massacre and debate the practicality of making a coffin just to inter a severed hand. I was similarly affected by the ending of Delmer Daves’ KINGS GO FORTH (1958), in which hero Frank Sinatra loses an arm in combat. Funny how body parts have to do with a lot of these movies I remember only as fragments. What well have been my first exposure to foreign (non-English language) film, THE MAGICIAN, has a scene in which a character pops open an inkwell and finds a human eye staring back at him. There is a lot of me in this fragment: my love of the grotesque and surreal, my preference for movies shot in searing, high contrast black-and-white, and my abiding fondness for foreign films in which the characters’ dialogue hangs in the air. I know a lot of people hate reading subtitles but I was never that guy… there was always something so beautifully other-worldly about subtitles, making me wish I lived in a world where the things we said to one another would actually float in front of our faces for a few seconds. Wouldn’t we all be better people if we lived in that world? Well, we’d be quieter, that’s for sure. Do kids still watch PBS (which is how I came to see THE MAGICIAN, via my Boston affiliate station)? I hope so.
12. DRACULA’S DAUGHTER (d. Lambert Hillyer, 1936). My inclusion of this Universal horror movie should surprise no one, given that I used up my fifteen minutes of fame to talk about it on Turner Classic Movies, when I was a guest programmer back in 2012. True story: when the Movie Morlocks filed into the studio to tape our segments, we each had a few minutes with host Robert Osborne, as he asked us what movies we had picked to plug. He ooh-ed and ahh-ed appreciatively when Susan Doll said “THE LOCKET” and Pablo Kjolseth said “FIVE MILLION YEARS TO EARTH” and said nice things to both, and when I name-checked “DRACULA’S DAUGHTER” Robert’s face screwed up like a mock orange and he said “Why’d you pick that?” Like I’d chosen, I don’t know, SCUDDA HOO! SCUDDA HAY! (1948) or PORKY’S REVENGE (1985), or showed up at a party at his house with a sixpack of Blatt’s. Well, I’d like to think that by the end of taping Robert understood the fascination. As I mentioned earlier, I saw a lot of sequels before originals when I was a kid and it was no different here. DRACULA’S DAUGHTER is the first Universal classic monster movie I ever saw (on a late night TV double bill THE INVISIBLE RAY, also directed by Hillyer); not only did I watch this two-fer, I audio taped it, and then replayed the dialogue for myself throughout the 1970s, until the tape tangled and snagged and was no more. No matter, I can recite nearly the whole movie from memory, so close as it is to my heart.
13. BRIDES OF DRACULA (d. Terence Fisher, 1960). You know how in APOCALYPSE NOW (1979), Martin Sheen’s character says of Laurence Fishburne’s character “The light and space of Vietnam really put the zap on his brain”? Well, this first sequel to Fisher’s DRACULA (aka THE HORROR OF DRACULA, 1958) — which I had, at age 10, not yet seen, of course) really put the zap on my brain. The colors! The shadows! Man oh man, if I had been wearing a bodice when I first saw BRIDES OF DRACULA, I’m fairly certain I would have ripped it off. The movie has such a delicious autumnal palette (I love Fisher’s use of fallen leaves skittering across the marble as a symbol of the death of hope, at least for the benighted Meinster dynasty), a villain (David Peel) who doesn’t come off as a pale imitation of Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing at his most aerobically righteous, and Andree Melly as my favorite vampire ever. Holy smokes, I wanted her to be my girlfriend back then. Vampire fangs have since gone digital and they come and go now and they never make the characters look like they have a big old mouth full of teeth and I miss that, and anyway BRIDES OF DRACULA is pretty much the best movie ever.
14.) THE THREE MUSKETEERS (d. Richard Lester, 1974). This was my first exposure to the classic Alexandre Dumas (pére, mind you) story (well, after the Mr. Magoo version) and remains my favorite. It’s considerably lighter fare than any of the other movies I have discussed heretofore and yet its grip on me is just as firm. Not only has it got a supergroup cast (led by — well, as I see it — Oliver Reed) but it is both sumptuously mounted and fleet of foot, which is a much more difficult trick to accomplish than you might imagine. Cinematographer David Watkin (a regular Lester collaborator who later shot MOONSTRUCK) really gives you a sense of time and place, and of antiquity that never loses its immediacy. It’s rousing — remember when movies were rousing and not just hyperkinetic? I saw this seven times when it played my New England milltown; sadly, I have not watched it in well over 20 years. And finally…
15.) ISLAND OF TERROR (d. Terence Fisher, 1966). Fisher directed this independent sci-fi/horror hybrid while on the outs with Hammer; given that it was an important movie for me growing up I’m rather glad he was given this unpaid vacation. Though the movie is taken up with a lot of running around an island off the coast of Ireland as creatures spawned from cancer research gone wrong go on a bone sucking spree, ISLAND OF TERROR climaxes with yet another siege scenario, as the movie’s surviving protagonists (among them Edward Judd and Peter Cushing, who has by this point had his hand cut off) take refuge in a community hall and bolster from within while the eerie “silicates” attack from without. If BRIDES OF DRACULA nails October, ISLAND OF TERROR really serves up the November, with all of the characters wearing greatcoats and hats or fisherman sweaters and anoraks. This movie has all the things I love: a terrible, hard-to-defeat monster (or, in this case, monsters), a cool location, and interesting characters, for the most part professional men who speak clearly and succinctly and work the problem rather than fight with one another. This was the template for how such a movie was to be done back then, and it was NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD that introduced the concept of debilitating bickering… a novel approach at the time that has become, in the intervening decades, wearisome and evocative more of authorial wheel-spinning than good storytelling.
And so anyway, that’s my 15, annotated. You’re supposed to tag people to continue the meme but I’m fairly certain we all have better things to do and movies to watch.