FINAL CURTAIN (1957)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*

“I know that I must find that object, even though I don't know what it is I must seek. I also know I fear that I will find that object. This night the calling is stronger than it had ever been before. This night was to be the night I had looked forward to with fear, knowing all the time that it had to come sooner or later and there was nothing that I could do to heed that call. This was to be the night. This, the last night of our play. This night when all of the others had gone home.”

I'm as surprised as anyone else might be, knowing of Ed Wood's notorious artistic failings, to find that anything he did registers as "good." And FINAL CURTAIN boasts many of the same failings as Wood's full-length movies. But judging CURTAIN only by its symbolic discourse, it is good on those terms. This 22-minute item is like a massively clumsy version of Edgar Allan Poe-- and though I can't prove it, I suspect Poe was one of Wood's inspirations for his sometimes-rambling confessional narratives.

Long ago, SF critic Algis Budrys wrote an essay on HP Lovecraft for some SF-magazine, archly claiming that Lovecraft mastered a POV Budrys called "first person hysterical." The comment wasn't true of Lovecraft at his best, but it was true of a lot of the works of HPL's literary idol Edgar Allan Poe, whether Poe's frenzied narrators dealt with physical danger (the torture-victim of "Pit and the Pendulum") or with internal upheavals (the protagonist of "Tell-Tale Heart"). And "first-person hysterical" certainly fits the unnamed protagonist of CURTAIN, as attested by the snatch of dialogue printed above, from the very beginning of the story.

So, backstory to the project. Prior to August 1956-- the time when Bela Lugosi, the most bankable actor Wood ever worked with, passed away-- Wood had written various spec-scripts, whether original or adaptations of Wood's own prose stories, as potential vehicles for Lugosi. FINAL CURTAIN would have clearly drawn upon Lugosi's iconic Dracula image, by having Lugosi play a stage actor who had just finished starring in a play about vampires, and who remained, throughout the narrative, clad in a tuxedo because that's what his stage-character had been wearing for the play's final performance that day. (Had Lugosi played the part, an audience would have assumed that the actor had essayed the part of Dracula, though the script never says so.) After Lugosi died, Wood managed in 1957 to shoot two pilot episodes for a proposed anthology teleseries, PORTRAITS IN TERROR-- one being FINAL CURTAIN (which came about because Wood secured permission to shoot his film in an empty theater) while the other was entitled THE NIGHT THE BANSHEE CRIED. When no network bought the project, Wood subsequently re-used footage from both in his 1959 feature NIGHT OF THE GHOULS. Ironically this movie also failed to receive commercial exposure until being discovered for the home video market in 1984. Then a copy of FINAL CURTAIN was found and released to said market in 2012. 

CURTAIN's protagonist is an unnamed actor (Duke Moore) who starred in a vampire-play for "months," and now that the play's run is over, he remains in the now-empty theater because he has some unexplained intuition about finding some "unseen object." The Actor (as he's billed in the credits) never speaks out loud, but a voiceover-- the only words spoken in the episode-- purports to be the Actor's inner thoughts, though the often-frenzied mental dialogue was recorded by another Wood player, Dudley Manlove. The Actor never devotes so much as a stray thought to his past, his profession, or anything but the vague unease haunting him. He starts at every cat's yowl, every creaking board.

After ten minutes of these ruminations, the actor heads upstairs, still unusually apprehensive about everything he sees and feels in the theater. He enters the prop room and sees what he momentarily mistakes for a woman with long blonde hair. When the apparition does not move, he remembers that it's the dummy of a vampire that was used in the play. The actor fingers the dummy's dress and her long hair, and he seems to have fallen in a little in love with the image, much the way Poe's protagonists conceived sudden amours. He starts to leave the room, takes one look back-- and suddenly the "dummy" (Jeannie Stevens) smiles and beckons to him. The terrified thespian manages to blunder his way out of the room, and once he's in the corridor outside, he simply goes back downstairs. Since "the Vampire" (as Stevens is billed) does not appear again, the Actor is able to dismiss the experience. 

After more ruminations, the Actor enters the "last room" in the theater. There he discovers a coffin-- though all the audience sees is a boxy shape, like an overturned cabinet. The Actor opens the "lid" of the "coffin," which he decides is the "object" he's anticipated, and he crawls in and shuts the lid, whereon the film ends with the implication that he smothers himself to death with a figurative Premature Burial.

Frankly, I went back and forth a little regarding the phenomenality of this short tale, with respect to "the Vampire." Ed Wood certainly didn't care about making things clear, so any conclusion I make might be my personal preference alone. I wouldn't have put it past Wood to have imagined (a) a real female vampire who just happens to be the spitting image of a prop dummy used in a play, and (b) who decides to stop by the theater in which the Actor's roaming around, as she's been called to him by his "half in love with easeful death" train of thought. Indeed, the plotline of NIGHT OF THE GHOULS-- the movie into which Wood inserted scenes taken from CURTAIN-- revolves around the notion that a phony spiritualist accidentally summons real ghosts. But at least the ghosts of GHOULS actually DO something, forcing the crooked medium into a coffin, where the swindler dies just as the Actor does.

Yet, even granting Wood's capricious plotting, it might be a bit more likely that the Actor simply imagines the prop dummy coming to life and beckoning to him-- which is, incidentally, the only really scary scene I've ever seen in a Wood movie. And the scene works because, in large part, viewers half expect it. And I'm not talking about expecting the Big Reveal because any viewer can see that the "dummy" is breathing. I'm saying that, because the Actor strokes the dummy's hair and clothes as if he's thinking about making out with the mannequin, it's the perfect "revenge of the feminine" for the dummy to come to life and say, "Sure, come on, big boy" with her gestures. Therefore, the Actor conjures up his own punishment, much as the narrator of "Tell-Tale Heart" imagines that he can hear the beating heart of the man he murdered. The Vampire-scene is also a turnaround-- probably unintentional-- on the end scene from Wood's GLEN OR GLENDA, where cross-dresser Glen's wife willingly permits him to share her clothing.

The Vampire-scene also mirrors the episode's final moments, in that first we see an unliving object seem to come to life, after which a living man makes himself unliving. One online review claimed that the Actor is really dead from the first, but I think this interpretation robs the character of any empathy. Wood might not have understood how to make the Actor sympathetic to an audience, but he WANTS viewers to feel for the thespian's inner turmoil. The Actor has played a living dead man for "months," and there's the broad implication that he's been seduced by the idea of death. The setup is not unlike that of the actor-protagonist of 1947's A DOUBLE LIFE, who becomes overly invested in playing Othello, to the extent that the performer begins thinking that he is Othello, with deadly consequences. 

                    

Does Wood come close to tapping Poe's unique exploration of the dark side of human psychology? No, but I think Wood, even though he made this pilot when he was still in his thirties, showed a penchant for death-haunted characters throughout most of his cinematic career. Whatever TV-network might've watched Wood's pilot-episodes would have been entirely justifying on rejecting them as having no prime-time potential. But in some ways, the short CURTAIN does a better job than the full-length features at translating Wood's anxieties into a "personal myth"-- one with at least a little more universality than the director's passion for angora sweaters.