FINAL CURTAIN (1957)

 

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

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." It wasn't true of Lovecraft at his best, but it was true of a lot of Poe, whether the 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.

Backstory to the project: in 1957 Ed Wood attempted to sell a horror-anthology series to television, without success. FINAL CURTAIN was one of two adaptations he filmed of his own short stories, the other being entitled THE NIGHT THE BANSHEE CRIED. For many years, both pilots were thought lost, although Wood re-used footage from both in the 1959 feature NIGHT OF THE GHOULS. Then a copy of FINAL CURTAIN-- which Wood filmed in one day upon being given access to a theater-- was found and released in 2012. 

The unnamed protagonist is an actor (Duke Moore) hanging out in a theater after everyone else is gone. He never speaks out loud, but the audience hears his thoughts, though the speech was actually recorded by another Wood player, Dudley Manlove. His mental dialogue implies that he was in the company that performed a play involving vampires the same day, but he never thinks about his past, his profession, or anything but the vague unease haunting him. He starts at every cat's yowl, every creaking board.

After five or 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, more or less dismissing the experience-- which is made easier by the fact that the "Vampire" (as Stevens is billed) never appears again. And then, after more ruminations, the performer discovers a prop coffin, decides he's meant to die, and crawl into it, where he presumably gives himself a figurative Premature Burial.

I mentioned earlier that Wood later repurposed scenes from the two TV-pilots into NIGHT OF THE GHOULS, which only had one advance screening in 1959 and was then out of circulation until another person purchased all known rights to the film for the home video market. GHOULS is about a phony spiritualist who subconsciously raises real spirits. Though the Moore character in GHOULS isn't the unfortunate ghost-caller, in CURTAIN I think Wood had some notion that the Moore character was "half in love with easeful death," as Keats wrote, and that the idle fellow more or less summoned some sort of spirit to the theater. There's no indication that the weird female is a vampire, assuming that the thespian hasn't imagined her, but I think Wood meant her to be real, though she functions more as an "opener of the way." It's only after the horror of seeing a supposed manikin come to life-- and yes, this may be Wood's one genuinely frightening scene-- that the actor becomes convinced that he's meant to die. One online review asserted that he's already dead, but I don't agree: the drama's greater if he's simply a living man succumbing to a spell of extreme morbidity.

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. The barely mobile "vampire" is the eminence of this short tale, bringing fatality like the spirit of the Red Death in the famed Poe story. I can imagine that any TV personnel who might have watched this production would have been entirely correct to dismiss it as having no prime-time potential. But in some ways, CURTAIN does a better job 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.