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TCM Underground, Saturday November 15th, 2014: IT’S A SMALL WORLD, 11:00pm PST/2:00am EST. Directed by William Castle. Cast: Paul Dale, Lorraine Miller, Will Geer, Nina Koshetz, Steve Brodie, Anne Sholter, Todd Karns, Margaret Field, Shirley O. Mills, Tom Brown Henry, Harry Harvey, Paul E. Burns.
Having spent his childhood hidden away from society by his well-meaning but unenlightened father, a dwarf enters the real world, where he encounters prejudice and exploitation at the hands of a criminal gang.
When a promised A-list assignment failed to materialize at Columbia Pictures, where he had slaved for the better part of a decade making programmers for the studio’s B-unit under the vulture eye of Harry Cohn, writer-director William Castle asked to be released from his contract. Hiring on at Universal-International for a three-year separation from Cohn (who later hired him back and got him working in Technicolor), Castle also pitched projects to independent Eagle-Lion Films, the American distribution arm of England’s J. Arthur Rank Organization. Founded in 1946, the company had absorbed the bankrupt Poverty Row outfit Producers Releasing Corporation and was by 1948 producing B-pictures to accompany into the cinemas such lofty British imports as Powell and Pressburger’s THE RED SHOES (1948) and Laurence Olivier’s HAMLET (1948). Seeing the cinematic possibilities in Robert Heinlein’s 1947 science fiction novel Rocket Ship Gibraltar, Castle proposed a space exploration film to be titled DESTINATION MOON but Eagle-Lion chief Arthur Krim turned him down, declaring the concept too fantastic. (Producer George Pal latched onto the discarded title and won a 1951 Academy Award for his DESTINATION MOON.) Undaunted, and with no shortage of big ideas, Castle took his sales pitch in another direction entirely.
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IT’S A SMALL WORLD (1950) was released at a time when Hollywood, its ranks thinned by Red Scare paranoia, was arguing for greater social tolerance in American society. Films such as CROSSFIRE (1947), GENTLEMAN’S AGREEMENT (1947), THE SNAKE PIT (1948), and HOME OF THE BRAVE (1949) chronicled the lives of “outsider” protagonists and stumped for the acceptance of people of different races and faiths, as well as for those suffering from the stigma of mental illness. Seemingly taking his cue (at least in part) from Tod Browning’s notorious pre-Code shocker FREAKS (1932), Castle (and cowriter Otto Schreiber – a possible pseudonym that is the name as well of an infamous German anarchist who died in a British prison in 1917) tells the tale of a dwarf (Paul Dale) who, having been raised in isolation by a well-meaning but unenlightened father (blacklisted actor Will Geer), strikes out at last on his own – only to be seduced by the seeming affections of a woman of conventional size (Lorraine Miller) and inducted into a gang of pickpockets (captained by Steve Brodie). Its narrative arc structured in three theatrical acts, IT’S A SMALL WORLD allows its protagonist by the final frames to slip the bonds of indentured servitude and find happiness, perhaps surprisingly, as the employee of a traveling circus. Despite the high concept of its logline, IT’S A SMALL WORLD is streets away from the exploitable fare that Castle would be making by the end of the decade. Conspicuous in its absence is the ballyhoo of MACABRE (1958), THE TINGLER (1959), and THE HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL (1959), the only gimmick being the film’s sincerity. Aiding in the cause of respectability is the cinematography of Karl Struss, an Academy Award winner in 1929 for F. W. Murnau’s SUNRISE (1927) and later nominated for his work on DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (1931), THE SIGN OF THE CROSS (1934), and ALOMA OF THE SOUTH SEAS (1941). (Though not remembered exclusively for his work in genre, Struss would also lens the horror/sci-fi classics ISLAND OF LOST SOULS and THE FLY, as well as two films for Charlie Chaplin.) Shot in the fall of 1949, IT’S A SMALL WORLD was the last credit for composer Karl Hajos (THE STORY OF TEMPLE DRAKE, WEREWOLF OF LONDON), who died in February 1950, four months before the film’s premiere.
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Following IT’S A SMALL WORLD in the TCM “overnight” slot is Jeffrey Schwarz’s wonderful, award-winning documentary SPINE TINGLER! THE WILLIAM CASTLE STORY (2007), which features among its many horrors talking head testimony from the esteemed likes of Leonard Maltin, Joe Dante, John Landis, Stuart Gordon, and John Waters, who I think speaks for us all when he says “I just wanted to be taken into William Castle’s world and live there!”
Here’s a great making-of short, featuring Schwarz and others. It’s a Castle-palooza!