TCM Underground’s line-up this week is just as interesting for the pairing of the films being aired as it is for the films themselves. We showed Dario Argento’s CAT O’NINE TAILS (1971) back in November (you can read my original TCMU write-up here) and if I remember correctly Burt Topper’s THE STRANGLER (1964) was aired last summer. They’re both good movies, I like them a lot, and I own them (regrettably, THE STRANGLER only on VHS). I’m tempted to put on a put of coffee and make a night of it, because seeing these two films, which I have many times, together in one shot would be pretty, you should pardon the expression, killer.
CAT O’NINE TAILS was Dario Argento’s second movie, made between his debut, THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE (1970), and FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET (1971) — the three comprising what is known by Euro-cult enthusiasts as his “Animal Trilogy.” It suffers from a poor reputation which is, I think, unfair and unfounded. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I should tell you that even Argento himself disparages the movie on a regular basis.) I really like this swanky murder mystery, which centers on elusive doings in and around an Italian genetics lab sleuthed by the unlikely amateur detective combo of Karl Malden (as a blind crossword puzzle maker, or “enigmista”) and a headstrong journalist (James Franciscus, whose next gig would have him playing blind, as the sightless but insightful insurance investigator LONGSTREET, which premiered in February of 1971, around the same time that CAT opened in Italy).
CAT was shot on location in Rome by Enrico Menczer, who had a decade or so earlier worked the camera for Pietro Germi’s THE FACTS OF MURDER, a 1959 police procedural also set in Rome that anticipated the Italian “giallo” school of psycho-thrillers while sharing with CAT O’NINE TAILS a bracing class consciousness. Backed by a terrific score by Ennio Morricone, CAT O’NINE TAILS is dark and moody and peopled with characters who are, for the most part, strictly out for themselves, from shady business partners to family members whose relationship, it turns out under closer scrutiny, is just another business deal. Yet far from being cynical, the film folds into the mystery the elusive specter of love, as various characters partner off, or attempt to, or lose their partners to strangulation or stabbing or worse.
Rolled into production while the case of the Boston Strangler was still unsolved, THE STRANGLER was planned to be called THE BOSTON STRANGLER (not to be confused with the subsequent Richard Fleischer movie of the same name) and shot on location — or at least that was the hype — before the call was made to keep the production more affordable local to Hollywood. THE STRANGLER shares with CAT O’NINE TAILS a clinical background (murderer Victor Buono — no, it’s not a mystery — works as a tech in a hospital lab) but betrays its debut to Alfred Hitchcock’s PSYCHO (1960) by making its serial predator mother-obsessed (if far more proactive than Norman Bates). THE STRANGLER also compares favorably to Edward Dmytryk’s THE SNIPER (1952), which had starred Arthur Franz as a similar UnSub who sublimates his sexual dysfunction with a high-powered rifle, but it’s where the movies differ that’s interesting. Franz’s wire-taut single shooter Eddie Miller is a ticking time bomb, a man who knows no peace and can’t fake it, while Buono’s Leo Kroll forgets (I think) his psychopathy for short stretches, allowing him the quite time to fall in love with the girl (Davey Davison) who runs the Toss-a-Ring game at his local Fun Palace. (THE STRANGLER‘s leading man and lady would reteam in 1967 for an unsold pilot for a DICK TRACY TV show executive produced by BATMAN creator William Dozier, with Davis playing Tess Trueheart and Buono the master criminal Mr. Memory.)
Made a decade after THE SNIPER, THE STRANGLER is a bit more frank with the aberrant sexuality at the heart of the matter, casting one of Kroll’s bachelorette victims as “a relief girl,” showing his mother (Ellen Corby) squirming after Kroll kisses her chastely on the forehead and carping “That’s no way to kiss your mother,” and in the talk among the cops on the case about Kroll’s use of a fetish doll. (No, not that kind of use.) And, of course, a serial killer who works by day behind a laboratory microscope brings to mind DEXTER, the long-running (2006-2013) Showtime series based on the novels by Jeff Lindsay. I like a lot of the secondary players in this, in particular sci-fi stralwart Russ Bender (WAR OF THE WORLDS, IT CONQUERED THE WORLD, INVADERS FROM MARS, THE AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN, WAR OF THE COLOSSAL BEAST, PANIC IN YEAR ZERO! as a police psychologist who says “schizzo”), David McLean (star of the short-lived NBC western TATE, about a one-armed gunfighter), and James Sikking (HILL STREET BLUES ) in his feature film debut as a police artist.
But it’s Buono’s show all the way to the end, capitalizing as it does on his Academy Award-nominated performance in Robert Aldrich’s WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? and recalling, by virtue of Buono’s body habitus and moody mien, Laird Cregar’s earlier work as a killer on the loose in THE LODGER (1944) and HANGOVER SQUARE (1945). The outcast-as-killer is well-trammeled terrain, of course, which makes the revelation of the guilty party in CAT O’NINE TAILS especially innovative, pointing the way, I suppose, to the nattier, better connected AMERICAN PSYCHO (2000).
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