THE BAT (1926), THE BAT WHISPERS (1930)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological*

Many "old dark house" films fit into my "phantasmal figurations" category in that they include someone pretending to be a ghost, as in THE SMILING GHOST, or a mad killer, as in THE CAT AND THE CANARY.

Neither Roland West's original adaptation of the Mary Roberts Rinehart play nor his four-years-later remake, however, have anyone pretending to be a spook.  Admittedly, the old mansion in which the majority of the film takes place is a veritable palace of forbidding shadows, and a comedy-relief maid continually fears the presence of phantoms.  But in both BAT-films, the menace is a murderous (but not technically mad) thief who chooses to dress up like the titular chiropteran.  This does qualify the film for the "outre outfits" trope, however.

Short summation for both films: "The Bat" is a master criminal who has continually flummoxed the local cops by warning them of his intended targets and still managing to rip them off.  He leaves the cops a mocking note about taking a rest "in the country," which means that he's decided to pursue a new target in the old mansion rented by dowager Cornelia Van Gordon.  All of the occupants of the mansion-- the dowager, her  niece, the niece's prospective boyfriend, and various other guests-- are menaced by the Bat, though one of them may actually be the masked supercriminal.

In a nutshell, THE BAT is far superior to the stagey WHISPERS, for all that the later movie has more actors that the average "classic film" buff will recognize (Chester Morris and Una Merkel, for two).  The creaky mystery-plot doesn't give either set of actors much to do beyond the most basic emoting, but THE BAT shows director West taking full advantage of excellent cinematography (partly supplied by the famed Gregg Toland) and of masterful sets by William Cameron Menzies.  The first fifteen minutes, showing how the athletic super-thief gains access to the skyscraper apartment of a wealthy jewel-owner, is one of the most exemplary scenes in silent cinema.  The same scene in WHISPERS-- which no longer included the participation of either Toland or Menzies-- falls flat.  Many scenes in WHISPERS re-use set-pieces from the earlier film, but it seems as though the exigencies of dealing with sound sapped away West's ability to suggest the weird sublimity seen in THE BAT.

Neither film rates high on the mythicity scale, however, even though THE BAT is masterful in putting across the kinetic emotional effects.  I debated as to whether or not these films qualified for the "adventure" mythos since they do concern a masked criminal-- the obverse of the more popular masked hero.  However, the emphasis here is not on the invigorating feel of an adventure-story, but on the feelings of fear perceived by the mansion-guests terrorized by the Bat.  Thus both BAT-films skew toward the mythos of drama.

The shadowy *frissons*  offered by the original BAT bear a strong resemblance to the moody *noir* visuals of the BATMAN comic book in its first year.  However, creator Bob Kane claimed that he did not see the 1926 film, only the 1930 WHISPERS.  I think it's unlikely that the 1930 film had a strong influence on the visual atmosphere of the comic book, though it's possible that some of Kane's artistic collaborators-- of which he had many-- might have seen the first BAT. It's equally likely that Kane and his many collaborators were simply influenced by many other Gothic-flavored entertainments of the period-- some of which had other bat-costumed heroes and villains.

SHADOW OF A DOUBT (1943), THE RETURN OF DRACULA (1958)

PHENOMENALITY: (1) *naturalistic,* (2) *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: (1) *good,* (2) *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: (1) *irony,* (2) *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: (1) *psychological, sociological,* (2) *psychological, metaphysical, sociological*


Originally I thought I'd celebrate Halloween with a review of a "hallowed" monster, namely that of 1958's RETURN OF DRACULA.  But since that film has been so often compared to Alfred Hitchcock's 1943 suspense-film SHADOW OF A DOUBT-- which I also re-screened recently-- I decided to make this a compare-and-contrast essay.

In keeping with most of Hitchcock's oeuvre, DOUBT generates suspense by presenting how such extreme phenomena as violence and psychosis burst forth from apparent normality.  In this case, Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten) is fleeing detectives seeking him as the suspected "Merry Widow" killer, known for marrying and murdering rich old women.  To escape the detectives the killer goes to ground in the small town where he was born, where his sister Emma has married Joseph Newton, a dull but respectable banker.  Of the Newton family children, one teenaged girl, henceforth tagged "Young Charlie," has been named after the long-absent uncle.  When Young Charlie learns that her well-traveled uncle is coming to town for a prolonged stay, she's ecstatic, for the girl is largely bored with her humdrum existence.

The skill of Hitchcock and his three writers (one of whom, Thornton Wilder, had already become celebrated for another take on small-town life in 1938's OUR TOWN) is that the story offers no clear choice between the deadening routine of ordinary existence-- where, significantly, Young Charlie's father and his best friend debate on the best ways to murder one another-- and the superficial charm of Uncle Charlie, which masks a near-psychotic misogyny.  Slowly Young Charlie's adulation of her exotic uncle turns to horror as she uncovers his identity, though the knowledge of his murders may not be as bad as being forced to see the world in his cynical terms:

You live in a dream. You're a sleepwalker, blind. How do you know what the world is like? Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do you know, if you rip off the fronts of houses, you'd find swine? The world's a hell. What does it matter what happens in it? Wake up, Charlie. Use your wits. Learn something.

Like most of Hitchcock's works, DOUBT is entirely naturalistic.  There's nothing strange or unworldly about Uncle Charlie; he's a reflection of not only his own personal psychotic quirks but also of the overturning of all of society's standards and rules.  Some critics have suggested that there's a subtext of incestuous fascination between Charlie and his sister Emma.  So it may be no coincidence that Emma has married a banker, while psycho-Charlie rails against the women he's killed, the women "smelling of money."

Paul Landres' RETURN OF DRACULA is nowhere near this ambitious, for all that it also centers on a young female in a small town being victimized by an exotic relative.  However, one of the strongest disparities between RETURN and the earlier film is that there is no actual familial relationship between the two. 

Interestingly, the film begins not with Dracula but with an ordinary Eastern European man, Bellac (note the name) Gordal, first seen preparing to debark on a train that will leave his homeland, so that he may reside with his relatives in America.  Though there are no overt mentions of Communism, Bellac's well-wishers congratulate him on having achieved "freedom" by journeying to America.  Bellac never makes it, for Dracula is on the same train.  The vampire lord kills Bellac, disposes of the body, and takes Bellac's place on the trip to America, and a different type of "freedom."  Later Bellac/Dracula echoes the earlier comment on freedom, but the vampire wants the freedom to expand a new empire onto virgin territory.  There are no sociological parallels between the vampire and European Communism, however: Dracula's kingdom, as he himself later says, is the kingdom of death.

Like Young Charlie in the Hitchcock film, teenaged Rachel also idolized her foreigner uncle, though this time she's never met him; they've only exchanged letters.  Like Young Charlie, Rachel is the only one in her family--consisting of widowed mother Cora and pesky little brother Mickey-- who's discontented with her drab existence.  (Interestingly, the family name is "Mayberry," but it's two years before that name would become emblematic of small-town life thanks to the ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW.)  However, neither director Landres nor writer Pat Fielder-- who also collaborated with Landres on THE FLAME BARRIER-- suggest that Rachel's discontent is more than superficial teenaged rebellion.  After "Cousin Bellac" shows up to meet the family at the train station, he charms Rachel, her mother and her brother, but not so much Rachel's boyfriend Tim. Prior to finding out Bellac's true nature, Rachel constantly insists that Tim ought to be more cultured like Rachel's worldly older cousin.  However, she yields easily to his juvenile displays of affection, so her attempts to reshape him must be seen as no more than feminine assertiveness, not real discontent with her life.

There's no interaction to speak of between Cousin Bellac and the widowed mother, but this time the young boy has a little more to do than provide comedy relief.  In fact, before Dracula even arrives in town, Mickey coincidentally stumbles across the place that will serve as this Drac's secluded Carfax Abbey: an abandoned mine, marked with a sign reading "Open Pit."  Though the film isn't heavy on Christian symbolism, I can't resist noting what the word "pit" usually connotes in that sphere. 

In fact, an inadvertent sacrifice takes place in the old mine, for Mickey's cat wanders off and gets stuck down in the aforementioned pit.  Mickey sees the cat and runs to get help, but the arrival of Cousin Bellac takes up everyone's attention.  When Mickey comes across his cat later-- it's not clear where the boy finds the feline-- the pet has been bled and killed.  It's rather unusual for traditional vampires to feed on animals, but the detail is largely a means to show the audience that Dracula has taken up residence in the old mine.

In a rather complicated arrangement, Cousin Bellac merely pretends to sleep by day at the Mayberry residence.  In fact, he spirits himself away to the mine, where he's set up his coffin.  Presumably the coffin is filled with the earth of his native land, as per the mythology of Bram Stoker, though the film doesn't say so, and doesn't say how Cousin Bellac transported the coffin to the mine.  One assumes that the coffin was shipped on whatever transports took Bellac to America, which suggests that Dracula went through a great deal of preparation to assume Bellac's identity.

In any case, whenever Rachel or anyone else ventures unexpectedly into Cousin Bellac's room, he's simply not there-- which may be a reason that the British release of the film was called "The Fantastic Disappearing Man."

Dracula, though not too picky to feast on a cat, doesn't pursue either Mickey or Cora, and can't immediately vampirize tasty Rachel since she regularly wears a crucifix.  Also in Stoker-tradition, he decides to go after one of Rachel's friends first; a young blind woman to whom Rachel reads books.  In a tense scene, he comes to blind Jennie at night, asking her if she can see him.  She responds that she can, just before he kills her-- but not permanently.

Jennie's death doesn't immediately tip off Rachel, but it does heighten her suspicions somewhat.  Bellac comes to Rachel in dreams, attempting to make her get rid of the crucifix.  Meanwhile, Dracula himself has been followed to town-- just like the detectives pursuing Uncle Charlie in DOUBT-- by men from his native country who know his true nature.  In wolf-form the vampire kills one of the pursuers, but not before he gets photographic proof that Cousin Bellac doesn't show up in photographs.  This enables the other pursuer to gain the help of the local minister and the sheriff in opening Jennie's crypt.

This event takes place at the climax, just as Rachel and Tim have found their way to the old mine.  Dracula, though he's already revealed his vampiric nature to Rachel earlier, attempts to make Rachel surrender her crucifix, first with blandishments, then with vampiric hypnotism.  He's briefly set back when Jennie is staked, for Dracula feels the pain of the stake empathically.  But in the end Rachel's crucifix has the main triumph, causing Dracula to back away from her until he falls into the pit (forgetting how to change into a bat?) and gets staked on some pointy mine-timbers.  One might say that the Lord of Death is finally returned to the pit where he belongs, to say nothing of suffering the same fate as his first American victim.

While there's not much likelihood that Landres and Fielder weren't influenced to some degree by SHADOW OF A DOUBT, RETURN OF DRACULA displays its own strong creative identity.

STUDENT BODIES (1981)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair,*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, sociological*

The tagline for STUDENT BODIES was insufferably pretentious: "At last, the world's first comedy horror movie."  Even unseasoned neophytes among the mavens of horror will know that this was nonsense. 

What the advertisers may have meant to say was that BODIES was the first comedy version of the slasher subgenre.  Even that is debatable.  The statement works only if one considers a "slasher" to be nothing but that particular type of horror-film commercially nurtured by the successes of HALLOWEEN (1979) and FRIDAY THE 13TH (1980), and leaves out all of the many precursors of the slasher-flick, some of which had comedic versions.

BODIES has a handful or two of funny lines or situations, particularly those revolving around the above-seen slasher-suspect Mr. Dumpkin, the shop teacher with a fetish for horsehead bookends.  However, as one slogs through all the stuff in BODIES, there's probably ten jokes that don't work for every one that does.  I suspect that the script by one-time director Mickey Rose (whose directorship was aided by an uncredited Michael Ritchie, according to imdb) was one where he didn't work too hard to prune away the unfunny stuff.  Possibly he thought the intended audience would accept pretty much anything aimed at the then-popular slasher genre-- an attitude we still see in the rash of transitory spoof-films like EPIC MOVIE, DISASTER MOVIE. On the other hand, Rose's best-known film-scripts-- his collaborations with Woody Allen on BANANAS and TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN-- were also marked by a scattershot approach to comedy.

Given that Rose is taking a "kitchen-sink" approach to spoofing the slasher genre, it's perhaps a miracle that he hit any of his more-than-obvious targets.  First and foremost, Rose goes after the supposed "prudish" reputation of the slasher-film, in which "loose" women are victimized while those who are more reserved are expected to survive.  His viewpoint character, the androgynously named "Toby," dresses primly and rejects the tendency of her high-school peers to have constant sex.  Meanwhile, an unseen heavily-breathing assailant-- called "the Breather" from the very beginning-- is knocking off teens and putting them in plastic garbage bags.  Strangely, as if in response to the accusation that slasher-films disproportionately target women, most of the killings include both one horndog male and one slutty female.  Toby confesses to the school psychologist that she came to despise sex when "my father locked me in my room-- with him in it."  Nevertheless, she's more upset by the repeated killings at her school, and determines to find the killer, even if it means dressing up like a slut herself.

It's hard to take seriously any of the film's junior-league Freudianisms, except for one...


SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

... in which it's revealed, long before SCREAM (but way after BLOOD AND BLACK LACE), that the one killer is actually two. In this case, it's the principal and his aged secretary, who are acting out the role of repressive adults cutting down the flower of youth.  They're even strictly hetero in their killings, with the female secretary killing all the young males and the male principal taking out the females.  This is the closest Rose gets to some insightful psychological mythicity.  So of course it's nothing more in his hands than a toss-off.

In my categories above I've labelled this film "marvelous," which requires a little explanation.

Up to a certain point in the film, it appears to be a comic take on the trope of the "perilous psycho."  There are absurd things that happen, but none of these are supposed to be real within the diegesis.  These nonsense-bits would *normally* call for the label of naturalistic "delirious dreams and fallacious figments..."

Except that near the end Toby wakes up from what has been an extended dream-- i.e., a "delirious dream" in the uncanny phenomenality, since it does interrupt the diegesis.  And so again BODIES seems to be in a different category of the uncanny--

Until Rose's script takes one more (thankfully brief) tangent, this time into the phenomenality of the marvelous, when (1) Toby, liberated by her dream from her old prudery, attempts to get with her boyfriend for some lovin', (2) he kills her for being loose, and (3) as he visits her grave, her hands burst CARRIE-style from the ground and grab him, at which point the image freezes and the film ends. 

Perhaps Rose thought that this derivative tip of the hat to the dePalma film would help audiences remember and recommend his low-budget, no-name-cast flick.  Perhaps he meant it as some acknowledgement that frumpy Carrie White seems a closer model for Toby than slasher-heroines like Jamie Lee Curtis. But either way, it may be the single lamest joke out of many in STUDENT BODIES.

LICENSE TO KILL (1989)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *sociological*

At the beginning of my review of the two XXX films, I wrote:

Most films in the “superspy” subgenre lie beneath the colossal shadow of the James Bond books and films. This means that like those sources, latecomers have the same ambivalence as to their phenomenal qualities. Sometimes they seem to take place entirely within a naturalistic world, and sometimes in one that includes just a few uncanny aspects. And sometimes the superspy’s world possesses outright marvelous aspects, though these are usually confined to specific super-weapons, like Bond’s invisible car in DIE ANOTHER DIE. 

Because a few of the weapons in the two-film XXX series qualify for the “marvelous” category, both films fall into that category as well. However, the general approach of the films is closest to a naturalistic spy-series like the Bourne films, so that the presence of marvelous gadgets in the narratives is somewhat marginalized and treated with a almost condescending irony.

When I wrote the above I hadn't screened either 1987'S LIVING DAYLIGHTS or 1989's LICENSE TO KILL in many years, so  I wouldn't have remembered that the two Timothy Dalton films displayed a similar attitude toward the super-gadgetry of certain Bond films, possibly including the last two in the Roger Moore corpus, OCTOPUSSY and A VIEW TO A KILL, both of which deviated from the more realistic Bond seen in FOR YOUR EYES ONLY.  LICENSE TO KILL is even more dismissive of Bond-gadgets than DAYLIGHTS, for in the earlier film Bond uses a couple of marvelous gadgets in the field.  In LICENSE, the gadgets-- a camera said to shoot bullets and another that shoots what appears to be a laser-- only appear in one scene where tech-whiz Q shows up to give Bond the benefit of his weapons-advice.  In practice, Bond only ends up using one mundane hand-gun from Q's arsenal, though one of Bond's foes does remark on the gun's special qualities.

Possibly even more than in DAYLIGHTS, the producers hoped to remold Bond to make him more "relevant" to eighties audiences by making him an icon of the "just so no" campaign against drugs.  It's true that various Bond books had the hero go after drug-purveyors, as did some of the film adaptations.  But there was no drug-connection in the Fleming short-story that spawned DAYLIGHTS, while the original screenplay for LICENSE by veteran Bond-scripters Richard Maibaum and Michael G. Wilson is all about Bond taking down the powerful Columbian drug kingpin Franz Sanchez.

To be sure, Bond goes after Sanchez not because of his business but in response to the old "he wronged my best buddy" trope.  Borrowing a scene from the book LIVE AND LET DIE, Sanchez wreaks vengeance on his nemesis, Bond's FBI buddy Felix Leiter, by having Leiter's legs mangled by a penned shark.  To avenge Leiter-- not only for his maiming but also for the rape and killing of Leiter's new bride-- Bond refuses the orders of his superiors and goes rogue.  However, this doesn't signal a serious departure from the Bond mythology: not only does Q make a rare unsanctioned trip into "the field" to aid Bond, M is patently sympathetic to Bond's quest.  After Bond's inevitable triumph, he's welcomed back to his old job without no mention of even some minor slap on the wrist.

Were it not for the marginal appearance of the weapons, LICENSE would be one of the wholly naturalistic Bond-films.  Sanchez is certainly a better villain than the two foes who occupy Bond's time in DAYLIGHTS, with actor Robert Davi portraying in him a formidable combination of violence (he's first seen whipping his mistress for sleeping with another man) and ruthlessness. Sanchez even professes a code of honor-- though it's a jaundiced one, in that he claims he values loyalty above all, but shoots one of his aides to death for mouthing off.  Bond spends a fair amount of time whittling away at the resources of one of Sanchez's major allies, Milton Krest (named for a dislikable character in the melodramatic Fleming short story "The Hildebrand Rarity"). 

Bond also makes a few allies-- both "good girls"-- Lupe, the mistress seen being whipped at the opening, and Pam, a tough female pilot/ex-CIA agent.  Both women compete for Bond's attentions, but neither qualifies as a "bad girl," though Bond briefly suspects Pam of duplicity.  In the end Bond worms his way into Sanchez's operation, much as the novel-Bond did in GOLDFINGER.  This leads to Bond finding out Sanchez's new plan to smuggle drugs out of his country, hidden in oil-tanker trucks-- a nice blend between two "foreign commodities" on which the U.S. became overly dependent in the eighties.  After the usual splashy Bond-stunts Bond has a concluding battle with the tough-as-nails Sanchez, who gets Bond on the ropes and only loses because Bond has an ace in the hole.

Sanchez's punishment of Leiter is the closest thing where he comes to committing a "bizarre crime," but while it's true that this isn't the most mundane way for a crime-lord to dispose of an enemy, I still label this trope as naturalistic in that the film doesn't conjure forth any *strangeness* in presenting this atypical murder-method-- in contrast, say, to Emilio Largo's heisting of two atomic bombs in THUNDERBALL.

CURTAINS (1983)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological*

CURTAINS is a stylishly photographed (by cinematographer-turned-director Richard Ciupka) Canadian take on the then-prevalent slasher genre.  It's possibly a little too "tony" for anyone looking for a festival of "babes and blood," but it delivers some good shocks despite the lack of the more visceral elements.  The writer, interestingly, was also responsible for one of the best known exemplars of 80s slashers, 1980's PROM NIGHT.

CURTAINS' script puts a high emphasis on creating a back story for the first two characters, Stryker (John Vernon) and Samantha (Samantha Eggar), a movie-director and an actress respectively, who have enjoyed both professional and private relations together.  Samantha purchases the rights to a property called "Audra," concerning a madwoman, which she wants Stryker to direct.  The film fails to get financing, but Samantha decides to research the role anyway.  With Stryker's help she gets herself committed to a mental asylum, so that she can play the Audra character with conviction.  Her expectation is that Stryker will release her when she's completed her research, but the cold-blooded producer sees her commitment as an opportunity.  He simply leaves her in the asylum, plannning to promote the film with a new and younger actress in the role.  Samantha escapes and learns that Stryker is auditioning six young actresses at a mansion in the snowy hill-country.

The script deftly juxtaposes images of youth and age in keeping with Stryker's courting of younger actresses to replace Samantha.  While in the asylum, Samantha, though not an old woman, feels her sanity threatened by her interaction with the real madwomen of the asylum.  Stryker uses the auditions as a 'casting-couch' whereby he seduces at least one of the aspiring actresses.  And when the expected killings of the young actresses commence at the mansion, the mystery killer-- whose gender can't be decisively determined-- wears the mask of an aged hag as she cuts down the young girls (and Stryker for good measure).

The middle part of the film creates some tantalizing resonances.  The first actress-victim is actually killed before she ever reaches the mansion, after having a premonitory dream in which she encounters a female baby-doll that attacks her before she is killed.  Following the dream, she's killed by the Hag.  Some time later, the second victim-- and the first victim to be killed at the mansion--finds a doll in the snow.  It just happens to be an exact replica of the dream-doll, save that this doll doesn't come to life, serving only to distract the second victim a moment or two before the hag-killer comes for her.  There's no explanation of the coincidence between one victim's dream and the other's reality, but it adds an extra level of creepiness to the second killing-sequence.

The apparition of the hag-killer is probably the film's strongest moment, though the actual killings are rather mundane and, of course, not overly bloody.  A few scenes after the first mansion-killing, the hag-mask is seen in the equipment Stryker brings for the auditions.  Samantha, despite her status as an escapee, shows up to claim the part of Audra by vying with the younger women.  Stryker, rather than throwing her out, tries to humiliate her by making it part of her audition to wear the mask as she attempts to seduce him-- a patent attempt to portray Samantha as completely "over the hill."  Samantha's humiliation serves to convince the average viewer that she must be the killer, that she stole the mask from Stryker for her first murders.  But of course, all is not as it seems.

The film's biggest flaw is that though one doesn't expect deep characterization for the victims in a slasher-movie, the movie might have profited if there had been a little more to keep one victim from blending in to another, precisely because this was a tonier, less visceral representation of the subgenre. 

THE BLACK TORMENT (1964)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological*


SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS


I happened to watch this little-heralded Gothic-horror film a little after screening SCREAM OF FEAR, and I couldn't have imagined a better contrast.  Whereas the men behind the SCREAM became so preoccupied with plot-conundrums that they lost all sense of the characters as resonant symbolic presences, director Robert Hartford-Davis and writers Donald and Derek Ford put forth a "phantasmal figuration" that allows the viewer to run with the spooky fantasy.


In 17th-century England, middle-aged Sir Richard Fordyke returns to the family castle, which is still the property of his father Sir Giles, a man so infirm that he must be carted around in a wheelchair.  Until recently Richard has been a widower, for his first wife committed suicide due to gossip about her inability to bear children.  Now Richard brings a new wife, Rebecca-- oops, I mean "Elizabeth"-- who will take over as mistress of the estate and banish all memories of the unfortunate first wife.

Yet as soon as he arrives, Richard hears odd rumors.  The lower classes are concerned about the recent murder of a young girl (in fact, the film opens with the buxom Hammer-esque beauty being strangled by a hard-to-see male assailant).  Some of them think that they've seen Richard himself in the area in advance of his return, and suspect him of taking lethal liberties with the local ladies.  Richard treats the rumors scornfully; has he not been witnessed in London for the past three months, where he met and married Elizabeth? None of his faithful retainers can explain the anomaly, least of all Diane, the sister of Richard's first wife, who now cares for the invalid Giles-- perhaps to avoid being turned out, though this isn't expressly stated.

Soon Richard begins to receive more evidence that the ghost of his first wife Anna may be haunting him, and more murders take place.  Hartford-Davis keeps the Gothic atmosphere intense and suggestive, so that even though the viewer may suspect a mundane explanation for the mysteries, the eerie world seems like one in which a ghost might return, or where Richard might have some sort of menacing doppelganger bent on giving him an evil reputation.  Meanwhile, all these sinister goings-on don't lend themselves to Elizabeth's smooth transition as mistress, giving her the full REBECCA-style treatment.

At the conclusion one learns that it's all merely a plot by Diane and one of the retainers, aimed at unhinging poor Richard.  The idea of haunting him with Anna's spirit-- merely Diane in disguise-- is traditional enough, though I found myself puzzled at the "doppelganger" idea.  Richard, though not unlikable, isn't a particularly deep character for an English lord.  He doesn't seem the type to be mentally unbalanced by rumors of a murderous doppelganger, and the murders of the locals-- as well as Sir Giles-- don't seem to accomplish much in the villains' involved scheme. 

Still, the script's psychological touches make the well-traveled road pleasurable.  Given the influence of JANE EYRE upon duMaurier's REBECCA, the Fords' script could be said to be faithful to that influence in that the "doppelganger" proves to be a variation on Bronte's famous trope of "the madwoman in the attic"-- only this time, it's Richard's deformed, insane brother who has been enlisted to perform the heavy killings.  In addition, after Diane takes a fatal wound in the hectic conclusion, she confesses that she like her sister was in love with Richard and resented his taking another wife.  Thus in a figurative sense Diane really is "Anna" reborn, even to the similarity of their names.

THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS (1987)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

LIVING DAYLIGHTS, like the Roger Moore opus OCTOPUSSY, takes as its lauching-point one of Ian Fleming’s James Bond short stories.  Whereas the film OCTOPUSSY resembles almost nothing about the original short story, DAYLIGHTS—the first outing for Timothy Dalton as the Bond-producers' fourth James Bond—does use more aspects of the “Living Daylights” short story.

The Fleming tale is a short meditation on the seamy side of spycraft, with particular emphasis on the less than glamorous side of being an agent being “licensed to kill.”  Bond is told that a Soviet defector plans to cross from East Berlin to the city’s western counterpart.  The KGB knows that where he plans to cross, but not from exactly when, so they appoint one of their best snipers, known only as “Trigger,” to stake out the area and kill the defector before he can cross over.  Bond is assigned to stake out the area as well, and to use a high-powered rifle to execute Trigger before the sniper can kill the defector.  Bond hates the assignment and distracts himself by fantasizing about a young woman he sees on the street, carrying a cello-case.  Later he finds out that the young woman is Trigger, carrying her rifle in the case.  When the defector makes his break, Bond partly disobeys his orders out of a chivalrous urge: instead of killing Trigger, he scares “the living daylights” out of her by shooting her rifle instead of her.  He escapes retaliation by other KGB agents but doesn’t mind when his handler tells him he may lose his double-O status due to disobedience.

The above scenario is roughly adapted for the first fifteen minutes of DAYLIGHTS, though one never sees this Bond evince disgust for his assassination assignment.  He’s assigned to protect a defector named Koskov when he crosses to the West, but there’s no mention of a particular KGB assassin known in advance.  While Bond watches the crossing, he spots a young woman who, like Trigger, conceals a rifle in her cello-case.  As in the short story, Bond shoots the rifle from her hands instead of killing her.  But when another agent berates him for sentimentality, Bond claims that the woman was an amateur, and “I only kill professionals.”

No sooner does Koskov arrive in the West than agents of the KGB steal him back, apparently on the order of a Soviet bigwig, General Pushkin.  Bond intuits that there’s another game going on, and tracks down the female cellist, Kara.  By pretending to be a friend of Koskov’s, Bond learns that Kara is Koskov’s girlfriend, and that Koskov instructed her to fire blanks at him as he crossed in order to hoax British Intelligence.

While Bond carries on his investigation, the audience is made privy to Koskov’s dealings.  He’s allied himself to an American arms dealer, Brad Whitaker, for some unknown gambit.  Pushkin, who has been investigating Koskov for embezzlement, had nothing to do with Koskov’s phony kidnapping, and even breaks off the Soviet Union’s relations with Whitaker.  Bond finds his way to Pushkin and convinces the general to fake his own death in order to draw Koskov out.  However, Kara becomes suspicious of Bond and informs on him to Koskov, though she returns to his side when Koskov shows his true colors.

By focusing on Koskov as a renegade, DAYLIGHTS distances itself from the Red-baiting of the early Bond books and films, and depicts Pushkin as a honorable opponent.  True, the action does move to Afghanistan, where Bond and Kara become allied to the Mujahiddeen, but this isn’t used to make any strong comment upon Soviet occupation of the country.  The introduction of Whitaker as a secondary villain is clearly meant to signal the sins of the West, even if he too is a renegade who does not represent official policy.  One problem with this approach, however, is that both Koskov and Whitaker are pedestrian villains. Even the petty drug-dealer Kristatos of FOR YOUR EYES ONLY has more character.  

The short story is of course entirely naturalistic in phenomenality, and so is the bulk of DAYLIGHTS.  Koskov and Whitaker are comparatively mundane opponents compared to such best-remembered Bond-fiends as Goldfinger and Blofeld, and their main plot—to use Russian funds to buy drugs in Afghanistan—is profoundly forgettable.  The only items that elevate DAYLIGHTS to a marvelous phenomenality are a couple of Bond’s special weapons—stun-gas devices and a laser in his car that allows him to slice a Soviet auto in half.  But these items appear so briefly that one suspects the producers wanted to have a few spectacular items in the film to invoke the “glory days” of the 1960s series.

As a minor note, this is one of the few Bond movies with no “bad girl,” although Kara takes on a very slight aspect of one such in a scene where she dopes Bond.  Despite being an amateur, Kara gets into the thick of battle rather quickly, and distinguishes herself well as a “good Bond girl,” even if her character is likewise not very inspired.