An expectant couple’s newborn baby emerges from the womb a monster.
IT’S ALIVE (1974)
Written, produced and directed by Larry Cohen. Cast: John P. Ryan (Frank Davis), Sharon Farrell (Lenore Davis), James Dixon (Lt. Perkins), William Wellmann, Jr. (Charley), Shamus Locke (The Doctor), Andrew Duggan (The Professor), Guy Stockwell (Bob Clayton), Daniel Holzman (Chris Davis), Michael Ansara (The Captain), Robert Ermhardt (The Executive). Cinematography: Fenton Hamilton. Music: Bernard Herrmann.
Color-91 m.
Showtime: Saturday May 9, 2015 11:45pm PST/2:45am EST
Larry Cohen’s $400,000 killer baby shocker IT’S ALIVE (1974) reaped better than $30 million in worldwide box office rentals for Warner Bros., with credit for the film’s unexpected popularity due in large part to an unforgettable advertising campaign: deucedly simple, the 30-second TV spot consisted of a back-to-front camera move around a wicker perambulator while an offscreen narrator declaimed “There’s only one thing wrong with the Davis baby… It’s Alive!” and a monstrous claw jutted violently from within. That the film earned back nearly ten times its shooting budget is less remarkable than the fact that its success came three and a half years after its original theatrical release.
Given the go-ahead by Warners head of production Dick Shepherd (emboldened by the success of THE EXORCIST, 1973), IT’S ALIVE fell victim to a regime change that occurred when Shepherd quit for MGM. Disowned by its home studio, the film was dumped into a single Chicago bijou before being remaindered to the ass-end of double and triple bills. Encouraged by praise from overseas (IT’S ALIVE was exhibited at the Cinémathéque Française in Paris and became Warner Bros.’ highest-grossing release in Singapore, second only to MY FAIR LADY, 1963), Cohen kept hope alive. When the players at Warners changed seats yet again, he showed the film to marketing executive Arthur Manson, who concurred with head of distribution Terry Semel (later CEO of Yahoo!) that they had a potential hit on their hands. IT’S ALIVE was given a proper re-release in March 1977 and, later that year, was booked by Warners as a co-hit in support of EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC.
Conceived in the aftermath of such scandals as Watergate and thalidomide-born birth defects, at a time when the so-called Generation Gap seemed stretched to its absolute limit, IT’S ALIVE reflects the fears of parents about the nature and implications of procreation. While recalling the sundry monstrosities of Greek mythology (Cohen hired New York actor John Ryan to play Frank Davis, a businessman whose newborn child tears its way from the womb and wreaks havoc across Western LA on its journey home, after seeing him play Agamemnon on Broadway to Irene Papas’ Medea), Cohen also imbues IT’S ALIVE with a canny sense of film history. While ROSEMARY’S BABY (1968) is an obvious precursor, Cohen’s use of the Los Angeles River Basin forges a kinship with the noir classics HE WALKED BY NIGHT (1948) and THE THIRD MAN (1949), as well as the big bug scare film THEM! (1954), which was about yet another form of contamination leaching into the gene pool of American life.
The specter that haunts IT’S ALIVE most thoroughly is Mary Shelley’s immortal manmade man, the Frankenstein monster. Cohen cadged his title from the iconic scene in James Whale’s 1931 film adaptation of the Shelley novel, in which Colin Clive (as Dr. Henry Frankenstein) heralded the birth of Boris Karloff’s unnamed monster with “It’s alive! It’s alive!” Midway through the Cohen film, Frank Davis (fittingly, a public relations man obsessed with image) ruminates on his perceived fraternity with that most infamous maker of monsters:
“When I was a kid, I always thought the monster was Frankenstein. Karloff walking around in these big shoes, grunting. I thought he was Frankenstein. Then I went to high school and read the book and I realized that Frankenstein was the doctor who created him. Somehow, the identities get all mixed up, don’t they?”
A little more on John Ryan. An intense, New York-schooled actor, Ryan often played criminals — some soft (THE MISSOURI BREAKS), some hard (DEATHWISH 4: THE CRACKDOWN) — and even when he represented law and order (RUNAWAY TRAIN) he wasn’t very nice. Ryan’s Methody approach to the character of Frank Davis is nearly worth the price of admission alone. He’s full of nervous energy, chewing gum, and mumbling his lines like a farm team Brando… and yet the approach works to etch the character of Frank Davis, a Hollywood PR man who seems unhappy and somewhat resentful about doing anything other than his job, who is a good and decent man but incomplete… and whose acceptance of his child’s monstrosity forces him to take the first steps towards a journey to self. The scene in which Frank returns to his office in extreme denial after his newborn baby has slaughtered an entire delivery suite full of medical professionals only to be effectively sacked by superficially sympathetic boss Guy Stockwell compares favorably to the scenes between Dustin Hoffman and George Coe in KRAMER VS. KRAMER (1979). Somebody should pair these two paeans to fatherhood on the same bill.
As with the Universal Frankenstein, IT’S ALIVE spawned its own share of sequels - IT LIVES AGAIN and IT’S ALIVE III: ISLAND OF THE ALIVE (1987) – as well as a 2008 remake shot in Bucharest.
IT’S ALIVE marked the ending of one Hollywood career and the birth of another. Composer Bernard Herrmann, long since on the outs with frequent collaborator Alfred Hitchcock, agreed to score Cohen’s film as long as he could record his symphonic shades of terror at the storied St. Giles without Cripplegate, a Gothic church in the heart of London’s Barbican. (Herrmann would compose scores for Brian De Palma’s OBSESSION and Martin Scorsese’s TAXI DRIVER before his 1975 death, but his cues from IT’S ALIVE were repurposed for the first sequel.) Design of the problematic Davis child was the work of 23 year-old Rick Baker. Baker had assisted veteran makeup man Dick Smith on the set of THE EXORCIST but would soon distinguish himself for his own work on such films as the 1976 KING KONG remake, STAR WARS (1977), and AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON (1981), for which he won the inaugural Academy Award for Best Makeup and Hair Styling.
Click here to watch Josh Olson praise IT’S ALIVE (and have a look at the film’s original trailer) at Trailers from Hell.
A fitting follow-up to IT’S ALIVE is Ted Post’s THE BABY (1973), a movie that may or may not horrify you but just might stick with you for a long time afterwards, like that one child who refuses to move out and live on his own. Released a year before the Cohen film, THE BABY has long struck me as a sort of cousin to THE BEAST IN THE CELLAR (1970), in which spinster sisters sequester their brother in the basement (this movie always seemed to me a horror reversal of the 1968 sex comedy THREE IN THE ATTIC, a variation on JOY HOUSE, a 1964 Rene Clement movie in which Jane Fonda keeps Alain Delon locked up in secret room) and THE MIND OF MR. SOAMES (1970), about a 3o year-old coma baby (Terence Stamp) who comes to at long last and begins making exceedingly difficult adjustments to the waking world. Well, if these movies teach us nothing else, I suppose, it’s that everything is relative.