TORMENTED (1960)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *metaphysical, sociological*

In my review of KING DINOSAUR, the first directorial effort of the recently deceased Bert I. Gordon, I made this statement:

If the incredibly mediocre KING DINOSAUR boasts any distinction, it's as the first directorial credit for Bert ("Mr. B.I.G.") Gordon. Given that Gordon got somewhat better over the years-- maybe in part because he didn't again work with one of the credited co-scripters, Tom Gries-- maybe one could think of DINOSAUR as the director's version of the crappy comedy-club, where the aspiring comedian can perform without anyone of consequence seeing him get all the "bad" out of his system. 

Even though I still think KING DINOSAUR was a pile of slop, my evaluation of two of the movie's three writers was probably inaccurate. For one thing, Tom Gries went on to write a lot more things that Bert I. Gordon did, and for many different projects, not just those he directed, as was the case with Gordon. And though about nine or ten Gordon films boast fairly strong writing, which may be partly attributable to Gordon's skills, I shouldn't have implied that he alone produced the scripts for all of his best-known works, his B-monster movies of the 1950s. In fact, on five of his best known works, Gordon shared writing credits with one George Worthing Yates.

With Gordon, Yates scripted THE AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN, ATTACK OF THE PUPPET PEOPLE, WAR OF THE COLOSSAL BEAST, EARTH VS. THE SPIDER, and finally, their last collaboration, TORMENTED. The first four share many of the tropes of 1950s science fiction films, but the fifth and last is a ghost story that's so over-the-top and cheesy that it feels more like something William Castle might have written in the same era.

Not that I dislike TORMENTED, which is one of Gordon's most entertaining films. It's also the first Gordon film to center on some form of forbidden sexuality. The "forbidden" aspect is sort of after-the-fact, though. Celebrated jazz pianist Tom Stewart (Richard Carlson) has been dating (read: screwing) hottie Vi Mason (Juli Reding). But when Tom hooks up with Meg, a woman from a rich family, he tries to give Vi her walking papers. They rendezvous on the top floor of an abandoned lighthouse, where Vi swears she'll never let Tom out of her clutches. But she steps past a guard rail and almost falls into the sea below. She catches an uncertain handhold, and begs Tom to save her. Tom almost reaches out, until he realizes that she can't ruin his sweet hookup if she's dead. So Vi loses her handhold and plunges into the ocean.

From then on, Vi begins haunting her hapless betrayer. Tom tries to pull her  body from the surf, probably to hide the corpse, but Dead Vi turns into a mass of seaweed. Tom begins to act spooky in front of her fiancee, though Meg doesn't catch on nearly as quickly as her little sister Sandy (Susan "daughter-of-Burt" Gordon, playing a nine-year-old though she was two years older in real life). Sandy has a childish crush on Tom, and even asks him to throw over her sister so that she Sandy can marry him later. 

A few others begin sensing weirdness as well, such as a blind neighbor, Mrs. Ellis, who smells the redolent perfume of Vi's ghost and even tries to confront the spirit at the lighthouse, without success. A more mundane threat comes from a grifter named Nick, who knows that Vi was a guest at Tom's house and tries to blackmail Tom. Vi hurries Tom along on his path of destruction by encouraging him to murder Nick and hide the body, which Tom does. But little Sandy witnesses the act. How far will Tom go to conceal his secret?

Though Richard Carlson gives one of his best performances as the haunted murderer, Reding's brassy blonde revenant is the star of the show. The effects are cheap-- at one point Tom grabs the disembodied head of the ghost, and the head turns into that of a blonde-haired mannequin. Yet the scene is still creepy despite that. And the creep factor warps up to eleven when Tom tries to marry Meg, and Vi interrupts the proceedings in such a way as to rattle the whole congregation.

There are a couple of flaws here and there, but overall the script is one of the tightest Gordon ever directed. Yet, on looking at his repertoire, I think I'm justified in saying that Gordon's first love was filmmaking, and that anything that helped him make a film was good, with no consideration about the fine points of writing. Many of his later works are just as scattered as KING DINOSAUR, and a few make even that junky flick look decent.