Curtis Harrington’s Night Tide (coming up on TCM on Thursday) is a thing of sunshine and jazz music, set at a seaside amusement park. Instead of assaulting the viewer with gore or violence, Harrington finds suspense in such subtleties as watching a girl eat a fish, and or when she then catches a seagull with her bare hands.
This is still a genre film, mind you–Dennis Hopper plays a sailor who falls in love with a girl who believes herself to be a mermaid–but the casual naturalism of the film seems unrelated to the world of gothic monsters and bug-eyed aliens that characterized horror fare of the early 1960s. If audiences had ever seen anything quite like this before, it would have been in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless—a riff on lowbrow genre elements to provide structure to a film that presents itself as slice-of-life glimpse of a disaffected youth culture. The distributors recognized the affinity, and played it up as a marketing strategy. The press kit sold Night Tide as a “unique American New Wave thriller,” and went on to highlight Harrington’s work in experimental film.
Let’s set aside the incongruity of a movie company trying to sell a teen-oriented horror flick on the basis that it was an arthouse film in the French tradition made by an underground artist. That’s weird, but it’s not even the weirdest aspect of all this.
This is the early 1960s we’re talking about, when underground filmmaking was simultaneously something vibrant and important while also being something so outre that it didn’t have a name. By the time anyone started talking about an “underground cinema movement,” Harrington had already stopped being a part of that movement. He had “graduated,” if that’s the term, from the unprofessional margins of the film world to Hollywood itself, and in making that transition blazed a path for others to follow: David Lynch, David Cronenberg, John Waters…
Hold your applause for a moment. In the journey from celebrated avant-garde artist to commercial filmmaker of modest renown, Harrington placed his reputation at risk.
Many of his admirers from the old days saw his new success as a mark of corruption. He had sold out, and this cast retroactive doubt on how artistic his early work could really have been.
For all intents and purposes, Curtis Harrington’s wild ride begins sometime after 1935 (the precise date is lost to us) when he first saw Edgar Ulmer’s The Black Cat (I know, that wicked little film warped pretty much every innocent who saw it, myself included).
The young Curtis was already fascinated by the writings of Edgar Allan Poe, and here was a film that took inspiration from the pages of Poe’s stories to create a work of cinematic energy. Harrington took it as a blueprint, a treasure map, a manifesto. At the tender age of sixteen, he took an 8mm home movie camera and shot a short film based on The Fall of the House of Usher.
He had no way of knowing that exactly sixty years later he would once again make a short film about Usher, bookends to a Poe-addled life. But he did know that if he wanted to keep exploring his hunger to bring the queasy nightmare world of Poe’s fiction onto movie screens, he would need better tools and techniques. So he enrolled in film school at USC.
Equipped with a film-school education and access to 16mm cameras, Harrington embarked on a cycle of short films. Historians call them “experimental” or “avant-garde” or “underground.” As far as he was concerned, he was just making movies. Whether based on myths or on the writings of Poe, Harrington’s films followed a familiar pattern. He depicted powerful women victimizing weaker men. It was a theme he would not let go, even as he moved on into the Hollywood mainstream.
Harrington’s shorts circulated through the country, distributed by the Creative Film Society. They continued to make the rounds of art museums, colleges and film societies into the 1970s, seeding inspiration to the next generation of aspiring film artists.
Making experimental short films does not pay the bills. Harrington’s day job was film critic.
He wrote a book on Joseph von Sternberg, and wrote for Cahiers du Cinema, the scrappy film journal that propelled Godard and the French New Wave onto the scene. He moved briefly to France to work more closely with the French New Wave-ers, and there aided Henri Langlois, founder of the fabled Cinematheque Francaise. On the side, he also wrote stories–like Secrets of the Sea, about a sailor who falls for a mermaid.
As the 1950s came to a close, and Harrington returned to Los Angeles, he was starting to think Secrets might make a pretty good movie.
The problem was money. His experimental work had been well received, but that didn’t easily translate into getting financing for a full-length feature. Harrington won an agreement from Roger Corman that Filmways would distribute the picture if it got made, and then he successfully borrowed against that distribution guarantee to raise the $50,000 needed to make the movie.
Dennis Hopper was already an emerging movie star associated with teenage rebellion. He was also a fan of Harrington’s shorts and keen to collaborate. Snagging one of the country’s hot up-and-coming young stars was a major coup for what was, admittedly, a low-budget exploitation thriller. As it happened, the rest of the cast was not quite to the same level. Harrington made a stab at casting Peter Lorre in a supporting role, but Lorre was too expensive. Instead, Harrington filled out the rest of the cast with a blend of non-actors and performers whose careers topped out as TV character actors. And an occultist who claimed to have actual psychic abilities.
Harrington’s work in experimental short films hadn’t involved a lot of, you know, directing actors, so he relied on Hopper to serve as a liaison to the cast. This was sometimes a lost cause. For example, the actor playing the police inspector had not been given a script and arrived on the set unavoidably unprepared. Harrington was too inexperienced to recognize the problem. Looking back with hindsight, he realized the part should have been recast, but such ideas never occurred to Harrington at the time.
Hopper may have helped smooth relations between the inexperienced Harrington and the cast, but no one served a comparable function on behalf of the crew. Allegedly Harrington’s diffidence kept the crew on edge through a difficult shoot.
The tension between the film’s artistic ambitions and its exploitation roots led to a spirited debate even before Night Tide was released. Italian critics went gaga for it at the Venice Film Festival in 1961. American critical praise soon followed, followed by the predictable backlash from avant-garde purists who resented its genre trappings.
Meanwhile, the film itself was tied up in a legal battle with one of the investors who demanded his money back. It was not until 1963 that the investor was placated and the movie was finally allowed into general distribution, as the bottom half of a double bill with Corman’s The Raven.
Night Tide was never a blockbuster hit, but the nice thing about spending just $50 grand is that it never had to be. A dreamlike thing that works its magic in unconventional ways, Night Tide continues to impress viewers with its suspenseful idiosyncrasies. Harrington went on to make more conventional thrillers, some of them quite good, but would remain best remembered for this strange little vision of a boy and his haunted girlfriend by the sea.
