Mid-Week Movie Break: Batman

French film poster for the 1966 film version of Batman.

Zowie! Welcome to this week’s Mid-Week Movie Break. It’s certainly been a crazy several days here in the city of Saint Paul. I’m not going to belabor the point and utilize this ongoing assignment platform as a social soapbox; I’m just going to say that Saturday afternoon, when I needed a breather from the world around me, I sat down with this week’s movie pick. A sort cinematic comfort food, if you will.

From L to R: Catwoman (Lee Meriwhether), The Riddler (Frank Gorshin),
The Penguin (Burgess Meredith) and The Joker (Cesar Romero).

Batman has been done to death. Literally and figuratively. As far as I’m concerned, Adam West is still the quintessential version of the caped crusader, because the 1966 series has all the bright, four-color pop style of the comic books of that era, and has, dare I say it, something else that the comics tried to imbue to their readers once upon a time, and that is joy. 

Batman series producer William Dozier had initially pitched the idea of a Batman movie to 20th Century Fox as a kickstarter for the planned television series. The idea was to have the film released in theaters while the first season of the show was in production, to both establish with the audience the world the characters inhabited, and drum up promotion for the weekly series. 20th Century Fox nixed the idea, realizing that they would have to eat the entire cost of the film if it flopped, and deal with the lackluster viewership that could result, leading to another financial loss if the show failed. Their concerns were ultimately unfounded though, as Batmania exploded like a confetti bomb on the planet in 1966, when the show was used as a mid-season replacement, and pop culture was never the same.

After the success of the first season of the Batman television series, Dozier got the go-ahead to make the feature length production. It was rushed into production after the first season wrapped, primarily to be used as a marketing tool to garner interest in the television show in foreign markets. Four of the most popular villains from the series reprised their adversarial roles for the feature, this time teaming up to tackle the dynamic duo. Frank Gorshin, Cesar Romero and Burgess Meredith returned as The Riddler, The Joker and The Penguin, respectively. First season Catwoman actress Julie Newmar was unable to appear as she was shooting the western Mackenna’s Gold with Gregory Peck and Omar Sharif (and Burgess Meredith, believe it or not), so Lee Meriwether stepped in to fill the skintight black catsuit. 

The plot revolves around the four super-criminals hijacking a ship containing Commodore Schmidlapp (Reginald Denny) and his invention, an instant dehydrator. The four criminals, working as a group dubbed The United Underworld, attempt to kidnap millionaire Bruce Wayne, via setting him up to fall for Catwoman in the guise of Russian reporter Miss Kitka, to lure Batman to his doom. When this fails and Bruce Wayne capably escapes, the United Underworld set their sites on dehydrating the United World Organization. The dynamic duo chase the super-villains back to their submarine made up to look like a giant penguin, and duke it out around many onomatopoeia title cards before ultimately restoring the dehydrated world leaders and restoring peace to the world.

I’ve read conflicting reports about the success of the film regarding its success at the box office. Commentary tracks and interviews given by the actors seem to paint it as a success, while the figures seem to marginalize it as a moderate success. Supposedly the film budget was around $3,200,000, and recouped all of it, with around $3,900,000 is sales. Whether  the success of Batman as a feature was marred by a skeptical public who’d gone to see the The Man From U.N.C.L.E. features, which were essentially two-parter television episodes padded out with some alternate footage and pushed into theaters, or whether Batmania had started to subside by the time the film rolled out July 30th, 1966, about two-and-a-half months after the last two-parter of season one, “Fine Finny Friends” and “Batman Makes The Scene” aired May 4th and 5th respectively, I couldn't say.

Watch the trailer here

Adam West as Batman, about to rehydrate the leaders of
the United World Organization.

Realistically we know that there never truly was a "simpler time," no halcyon era where everyone was happy and everything was perfect, but Batman denotes a notion of a time when perhaps people didn't take themselves as seriously, Maybe that's just nostalgia talking. Regardless, if you haven't seen Batman, I highly recommend you do. It's the right kind of pop culture preposterousness, minus the self-importance, that we could all use a heady dose of right now.

Mid-Week Movie Break: Black Tight Killers

Biff! Bang! Pow! All we’re missing are the flashing onomatopoeia title cards in this swinging 1966 time capsule of the grooviest aspects of the mid-60’s pop culture mania, for this week’s Mid-Week Movie Break. This week we highlight the tongue-in-cheek spectacle Black Tight Killers, starring Akira Kobayashi and Chieko Matsubara.

Screen grab showcasing some of the oddball club interiors seen in the film.

Sandwiched between the tail end of the Nikkatsu noir movies of the 1960’s, and the first wave of the Pinky Violence exploitation films on the 1970’s, Black Tight Killers (Ore ni Sawaru to Abunaize) is a pop art spectacle well worth the time it takes to seek it out.  For a taste of what’s in store for you, you can watch the trailer here.

Akira Kobayashi 45 on Colombia

Our hero (Kobayashi) is a combat photographer named Hondo. Hondo is enchanted by a young stewardess named Yuriko (Matsubara) during his flight back home from a recent assignment, and she concedes to have dinner with him. The date doesn’t end well, as Yuriko is kidnapped and Hondo is framed for the death of a gangster. The real killers? A group of women in black tights and jackets with knives hidden in their hair brushes; the titular Black Tight Killers! It appears Yuriko is a marked woman, as a coalition of hoods–formed by American mafioso and Japanese yakuza–are after her to get their hands on some gold her father may have stolen and hidden away during WWII. As Hondo tries to clear himself with the police and track down the missing Yuriko, he’s constantly hindered, and helped, by the group of assassins who employ such bizarre weaponry as exploding golf balls, chewing gum bullets to spit into the eyes of their enemies, deadly tape measures, and 45rpm records thrown like throwing stars. And get this, when they aren’t out foiling Hondo or knocking off gangsters, the ladies moonlight as a troupe of go-go dancers in a crazy rock club! What is their part in all of this madness? Watch and find out!

Take all of the best camp elements of The Man From U.N.C.L.E., James Bond and Batman, throw in some Takeshi Terauchi surf guitar and Japanese Group Sounds 45s, some secret agent jazz, a little skin (though no visible nudity), go-go dancing film breaks, blend well, then you have the crazy concoction that is Black Tight Killers. Want more proof of the candy colored madness that awaits you? Watch this dream sequence from the film (not the original music, though)! It’s like The 5.6.7.8.’s got their own girl gang flick!

The Black Tight Killers in a masked go-go dance frenzy

The film was directed by Yasuharu Hasebe, who went on to direct Alleycat Rock: Female Boss, about warring female biker gangs, and a number of the aforementioned Pinky Violence films. Lead actor Akira Kobayashi did some film and television work through the early 1970s, was a popular crooner for a while, including the title tracks to a number of his films, then became a professional golfer. Actress Chieko Matsubara was spotted at a beauty contest and has since starred in over 115 films, including the classic Tokyo Drifter which came out the same year as our feature, and is still working today. She also apparently did some crooning of her own, as suggested by the sleeve pictured below. She released some singles in he late 60s on Columbia. The amazing soundtrack is provided by prolific film and television composer Naozumi Yamamoto, and as far as I can tell, is not available in any format, which is a damn shame.

Note the Goldfinger-esque gold-painted dancers. This is a plot point in how
the crooks intend to do away with Yuriko.

Chieko Matsubara 45 for Colombia Records.

Mid-Week Movie Break: The Monster Of Piedras Blancas

This week we utilize our Mid-Week Movie Break to hit the beach! Not the sunny, surfer-filled beaches of Hawaii, Southern California, or Lake City, MN,  but the craggy, brackish lighthouse property on the coastal outskirts of Piedras Blancas, CA. Get your baggies on and remember — six feet apart!

A page from issue 18 of The Monster Times,
spotlighting TMOPB.

The Monster Of Piedras Blancas is a sleepy little creature feature produced by Vanwick Productions, and is largely the culmination of favors called in by producer Jack Kevan, a makeup specialist and effects engineer who worked under the infamous Bud Westmore at Universal. You can watch the trailer here, or the entire picture here. It features a bevy of familiar faces from the world of 1950s television and b-film celluloid, like Les Tremayne (The Angry Red Planet, The Monolith Monsters) and Forrest Lewis (The Thing That Couldn’t Die), and features some shocking-for-its-time gore, especially when compared to what companies like AIP and Universal-International were putting out concurrently. The story hinges on a persnickety lighthouse keeper named Sturges forming a relationship with a legendary sea monster after his wife passes away. Lonely and isolated, Sturges (John Harmon, veteran radio, television and film actor who has appeared in key episodes of Star Trek, The Twilight Zone, The Rifleman and others) discovers that the rumored monster is real and starts to leave meat scraps for it. The monster grows dependent on Sturges’s offerings, so much so that years later when Sturges arrives at the local grocer’s store a day late and doesn’t get the scraps, the monster goes on a  killing spree. In the mix to add to the drama is Sturges’s daughter Lucille, back from college for the summer, and her new beau, a young scientist simply named Fred.

The opening shot to the Flipper episode "Flipper's Monster".

Our young protagonists Fred and Lucille, simply credited as “The Boy” and “The Girl”, are played by Jeanne Carmen and Don Sullivan. Carmen was a pinup queen and actress who starred with Jayne Mansfield in The Untamed Youth and was a familiar face within the pages of men’s magazines of the time. She was also an uncredited stripper in the Betty Page burlesque film Striporama and was the first female trick-shot golfer. You can hear her tell it all here. Yes, it would be criminal to neglect the fact that she was also in a Three Stooges short, “A Merry Mix-Up”, even if it was during the waning Joe Besser years. Sullivan is probably better known for his starring role in the teens vs. monster cult classic The Giant Gila Monster, which came out the same year. We get to hear Don rock out in Gila Monster with his ukulele, crooning “The Mushroom Song,” which you can see/hear here.  Carmen allegedly had some ties to the Kennedys and the mob and was advised to make herself scarce after Marilyn Monroe turned up dead, eventually moving to Arizona where she lived in obscurity for decades. Sullivan left the entertainment business to become a chemist and entrepreneur for the cosmetic hair care industry. 

Jeanne Carmen in a publicity still from The Three Stooges short A Merry Mix-Up.
Carmen is third from the left, cuddling up to Joe Besser.

The picture was produced by Jack Kevan and production partner Irvin Berwick, a one-time dialog editor for Columbia who had worked with William Castle and Jack Arnold, so he was already entrenched in the ways of the low budget sci-fi/horror/monster movie. Tired of working in obscurity in largely thankless and uncredited roles for the studios, Kevan and Berwick decided to try their hand at becoming independent producers, hence Vanwick Productions. The picture was made for around $29,000 with a number of favors and at-cost help being utilized from Kevan’s old connections at Universal. To my knowledge the only other picture Vanwick Productions ever had a hand in producing is a seedy 1966 drama called The Street Is My Beat, filmed in Texas. Kevan and Berwick did work together again however on pictures like Crown International’s The 7th Commandment (1961).

Don Sullivan on his book The Perfect Look:
Don Sullivan's Hair Care Secrets

Jack Kevan had helped develop the Gill-man suit for the Creature From The Black Lagoon and the applications for the titular creatures in The Mole People; elements of both were used in the Piedras Blancas monster costume, as well as pieces from the Metaluna Mutant from This Island Earth. The Piedras Blancas suit surfaced again years later in the 1965 Flipper tv series episode “Flipper’s Monster”, where Flipper comes across a low-budget monster movie production. The episode was directed by none other than Ricou Browning, the man who wore the Gill-man suit for the underwater shots in Creature From The Black Lagoon and can be seen here. The Monster Of Piedras Blancas was directed by Berwick, whose son Wayne makes an appearance as the little boy who finds the headless grocer. The film is ably acted for the most part. If anything it’s really the pacing that keeps it from being something special, which by no means should imply that it’s unwatchable. It’s a by-the-numbers late 1950s low budget monster movie which tries to make up for its short changing you on action with a mild dose of gore vis-a-vis some decapitated heads. Berwick went on to direct low budget pictures like Strange Compulsion, Malibu High and Hitch Hike To Hell through the early 1980s. Kevan, who helped with makeup effects on everything from The Wizard of Oz to Abbott And Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde to The Incredible Shrinking Man, seems to have abandoned the Hollywood game for the most part after The Monster Of Piedras Blancas and by the mid-sixties had joined Don Sullivan in the cosmetics field, as indicated by this 1965 article (below) from the Honolulu Star Bulletin.

Honolulu Star Bulletin article highlighting the career of Jack Kevan.

Though the film was largely forgotten after it’s release, it’s a fun little foam rubber monster romp that has endured mostly as an iconic still image of the titular monster brandishing one of the aforementioned severed heads, featured regularly in monster magazines of the 1960s and 70s, forcing itself onto the must-see lists of a whole generation of monster kids who were probably unlikely to find it before the advent of home video, save in a truncated 8mm print released to the consumer market. Punk aficionados will recognize the famous still of the monster and rubber head from the cover of the Angry Samoans’s 1982 debut LP “Back From Samoa”. 

Packaging of the Super 8 home movie version of
The Monster of Piedras Blancas.

While The Monster Of Piedras Blancas isn’t as strong a fish-man monster film as even the weakest of the Universal Creature From The Black Lagoon trilogy, nor nearly as revered a cult classic as Del Tenney’s The Horror Of Party Beach, I still recommend a viewing.

Mid-week Movie Break

Hi there! My name is Josh and I’ve been invited to contribute a regular film feature to the mighty WFMU Ichiban blog! My goal is to do a regular weekly focus on great pop cultural artifacts from the early days of cinema through the early 1970s, likely regularly featuring the names and faces found indelibly revered on the mighty Rex’s Fool's Paradise memorial playlists.

I figured I’d utilize my inaugural post to focus on something we could all use a little of right now, and that’s levity. We’ll get to the rubber monsters, masked adventurers and secret agents later, but right now I’d like to highlight a comedy classic that works two-fold with the modus operandi of this here music-talky blog, which is highlighting great ephemera from the early half of the previous century, and providing a musical element that can be appreciated as an obscure piece of pop music history as well. The feature in question is Abbott And Costello’s Comin’ Round The Mountain; the 1951 Universal feature that follows their meeting the Invisible Man, and prefaces their being Lost In Alaska. 

Margaret Hamilton as witch Aunt Huddy in
Comin' Round The Mountain

In Comin’ Round The Mountain, Bud Abbott plays not-quite-adept talent agent Al Stewart, and Lou Costello plays bumbling would-be escape artist Wilbert Smith. When Wilbert’s debut escape attempt goes awry, Stewart’s one lucky break, singer Dorothy McCoy, realizes that Wilbert is a member of her family, the McCoy clan of Kentucky—an old hill folk family that has claim to a lost treasure secreted by clan patriarch Squeeze Box McCoy. Dorothy and the boys head back to the hills to stake a claim on the hidden treasure. In the interim, the cast runs afoul of a love potion concocted by show-stealing hill witch Margaret Hamilton (The Wizard of Oz, 13 Ghosts), forced marriages, and reigniting a feud between the McCoy clan and their rivals, the Winfields, lead by Glenn Strange in the hillified role of Devil Dan. Obviously some of the Abbott and Costello routines in the picture haven’t aged well in the eye of modern sensibilities, and the played-for-laughs running theme of child brides will likely cause some clenched teeth, but overall the humor still stands strong. The hillbilly kinfolk are portrayed in the broadest Li’l Abner stereotypes this side of an episode of Hee-Haw; this isn't a Herschell Gordon Lewis production. Think torso-long beards, shapeless felt hats and moonshine jugs corked with corn cobs. There are numerous musical pieces by co-star Dorothy Shay "The Park Avenue Hillbillie" and they are fantastic in the Spike Jones / Stan Freberg vein of humorous novelty numbers. The film also features some other recognizable faces, including character actor and dialectician Robert Easton (The Giant Spider Invasion) and singer/actress Shaye Cogan, who can be seen/heard singing “Pathway To Sin” in the 1957 Alan Freed vehicle Mr. Rock ’n’ Roll here. She also starred again with Abbott And Costello the following year in the 1952 color feature Jack And The Beanstalk. 

Poster for a double bill of Comin' Round The Mountain paired with the 1948
Marjorie Main, Percy Kilbride (not as Ma & Pa Kettle) film Feudin', Fussin' and A-Fightin'.

Co-star Dorothy Shay (born Sims) had a rather ironic career trajectory: born in Jacksonville, Florida, Shay took professional singing lessons to try and lose her southern twang to find success as a professional singer. Later, after she found fame by performing a hillbilly novelty tune “Uncle Fud” with the Morton Gould orchestra, she made her way as a solo novelty act, billed as Dorothy Shay “The Park Avenue Hillbillie”. Shay recorded a handful of records, starting with The Park Avenue Hillbillie Sings on Capitol in 1946, and eventually moved to Columbia. By the early 1960s she had changed career paths to become a bit player in television shows like Adam-12, The Virginian, The Brady Bunch and The Waltons. 

You can watch/hear Shay perform "A Little Western Town Called Beverly Hills" here.

King Freddy Shows Us What It's All About

Freddy Cannon! (From Village Of The Giants, 1965).

Louis Armstrong

Happy birthday to Louis Armstrong, born 112 years ago today (08/04/1901) in the world's most musical city, New Orleans.  In 1961, he worked with another musical genius, Duke Ellington, on the soundtrack for the film Paris Blues, which featured Sidney Poitier, Paul Newman, Diahann Carroll and Joanne Woodward.  In addition to his soundtrack contributions, Armstrong appeared in the movie, playing a character, a trumpet player naturally, called Wild Man Moore.  Here's the song by that name from the soundtrack.

Duke Ellington featuring Louis Armstrong  -  Wild Man Moore


Photo: the Jet magazine archives.

Mondo Topless Radio Extravaganza

Thanks to my pal Phil for sending along these fantastic screen captures of radio shots from Russ Meyer's Mondo Topless. 

Mad Dog Coll

Do The Jellyfish

(Sorry, don't know why the thumbnail's not displaying, but the video does work and is well worth your time!)

As the good folks at PCL LinkDump noted, this clip is "From the 1966 movie STING OF DEATH, the greatest movie ever made featuring a half man, half jellyfish villain. If you enjoy close-up shots of girls butts in tight pants, then this movie is for you!" And, yes, that's Neil Sedaka doing the singing.

You should really click on over to their site, where they've also fixed us up with some fantastic screen captures. Tip of the cap to Thom Tex Edwards for bringing this to my attention.

Double Indemnity House

Here's a screen capture from Billy Wilder's superb 1944 film noir, Double Indemnity. Thanks to Debbie, I'm now helplessly addicted to the What Was There site, which will let you superimpose old photos on top of newer views -and- dissolve them back and forth, using the plus and minus keys. I'll try not to go too nuts with this trick here on Ichiban, but we'll see.

This is Quebec Drive at La Punta Drive, up in the Hollywood Hills. Go see what it looks like now. I learned about this (and yesterday's Sunset Strip film clip) via a Facebook group called Vintage Los Angeles, which I very highly recommend you check out.

Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!