Poor Old Leo G. Carroll

Poor old Leo G. Carroll, I remember my mother saying.  She mentioned this when I talked about the classic 1955 horror movie, Tarantula.  I had just seen a bit of it during an exciting film extravaganza in the gymnasium of my school in Pocatello Idaho, 1972. (I reckon it was an 8 mm silent, but an amazing thing for a second grader in that innocent era, long before VCR, cable TV, etc.)

The little snippet of a memory I have of my mother saying poor old Leo G. Carroll has stuck in my mind all these years because, perhaps even as a young boy, I thought it an unusual remark. He was an actor in the film, playing a man with a horrifying disfigurement--it wasn't a documentary.

All these years later, having seen the film again ( and loving it just as much), I have a clue as to the context of my mom's remark.  I have just read on Wikipedia that he died in 1972 (living to a ripe age of 85.) It could well be that mom had read his obituary recently in the paper, and this flavoured her memory of him.

In any case his role is stunning in the film. His metamorphosis from a crotchety geezer into a gruesomely distorted, asymmetrical acromegelic is scary. I love the scene when he is lecturing his young graduate student intern, who notices something odd in his face. The make-up job is subtle, the success of the scene due more to the actor's qualities.

The whole film is good, one of the very best of the big bug movies. This is largely due to the human interest of a parallel, human monster. The big spider in the desert is excellent, shucking cattle and humans like the best cattle mutilation theories, but the strange tragedy that befalls the the scientist is equally compelling.

Al Feldstein

Al Feldstein, last of the E.C. Giants, has fallen

Earlier this year I had the pleasure to pore over a recently published book, Feldstein by Grant Geissman It's a monograph of the master artist, writer  and editor, a book with the perfect ratio of mouth-watering art and well-researched biographical info.

The young Al Feldstein (right) with publisher William Gaines during their E.C. years (early 1950s)

Part of the pleasure of the book was the awesome feeling of  I'm reading about this genius in the year 2014, and THE GUY IS ACTUALLY STILL ALIVE! All the other titans of the era are gone, often decades gone. I'm glad that I was able to read the book with this feeling, which suddenly ended yesterday, when I turned the pages of the NY Times,  to find his obituary starring at me. At least the article is a substantial one.

 Feldstein was the editor of Mad Magazine during its most influential years. South Park, The Onion, The Simpsons-- almost any type of humour we know of now owes itself to the Mad mentality. Mad was a collaborative effort, but Feldstein propelled it into its huge circulation, which influenced at least one generation directly, and indirectly influences us all henceforth.

As Mad editor Al Feldstein has wide cultural significance, and all the world needs to acknowledge his import. But for the more narrow group of comic book geeks (of which I am certainly a member) he will  also be remembered as a founding member of E.C. comics, the high watermark of the art form.

Lee Marvin

Point Blank Color

25x25 oil 2014

Lee Marvin (1924-87)… Point Blank is a film that hypnotises me every time it is on. This little painting just happened when I was making a color wheel the other day. No spoilers here, but the film is circular.  Walker, a target… The walking sequence… 

Lee Van Cleef

On my favourite podcast, http://bmoviecast.com, I just heard that Grindhouse has released a deluxe, extra-laden disc of the The Big Gundown, one of the greatest films that Lee Van Cleef ever starred in. What better time for me to display my recent Van Cleef ceramic sculpture (with hat it becomes a kind of jar.)

Whether Lee Van Cleef remains in our memory as the stoic bounty hunter in the Leone westerns, or the more surprisingly faceted gunman in Sollima's Big Gundown, we must concur-- the actor had a face made for the spaghetti western genre. Or maybe it's the other way around…perhaps the genre was made by his face!

His hawk nose embodied a hunter. His steely squint…pity the prey on the receiving end!  He was a sculpture in flesh and bone, topped off with sweat beads.

Yet, unlike certain actors, who are at best when silent, the guy could act with words. They matched his looks, sometimes wry, sometimes reptilian. He could handle horses too, important for a western actor.

His presence is indelible, making him one of those actors who hasn't seemed to have died so long ago. But he has been gone nearly a quarter century, dying in 1989. 

Tor Johnson

Tor

ceramic 10cm high

signed, numbered, dated by Roman Scott, 2013

Tor Johnson (1903-1971) was a Swedish actor chiefly known for his roles as lumbering types in auteur-directed films. Alas, not Ingmar Bergman, but Ed Wood B-movies.

A former wrestler, he was a big man who looked fierce when he wanted to. However, most accounts have it that he was of a sweet disposition, easy to work with. Rudolph Grey's excellent biography of Ed Wood, Nightmare of Ecstasy, has some good anecdotes about Tor. But it's hard to find any compelling biographical info from the Internet at this time (such a common problem we encounter when researching pre-digital folk.)
One meme that has gathered steam over the last decades is that Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space is the worst film ever made. I disagree; such an entertaining film could never be judged as very bad. I will put forth a more reasonable candidate for worst film ever, in which Tor Johnson also starred: The Beast of Yucca Flats, by Coleman Francis. This film is execrable. The plot, acting, photography and editing are dreadful. And yet, even in this atrocity of boredom, Tor Johnson has a presence, something that sticks with you. He is perhaps an example of biological sculpture, a bodily form interesting outside of drama's requirements.

Ernest Borgnine

Cabbie 

earthenware toothpick cup

9cm high

inscribed: Cabbie, No.2, Roman Scott 2013

Ernest Borgine (ne' Ermes Borgnino) may be my favorite of all character actors. Certainly a scene-stealer, he needn't have had first billing to remain emblazoned in the mind. For instance, his portrayal of  Cabbie in John Carpenter's Escape from New York is equally strong as the morose Kurt Russells' Snake Plissken, or Lee Van Cleef's reptilian police commissioner. In this film Borgnine even had the last word, posthumously. Dying only last year, immortal Ernest is gone, but certainly not forgotten!

Carlos Allende, the most mysterious man

Carlos Allende was an enigmatic man who wittingly or unwittingly propelled the bizarre whispers of the Philadelphia Experiment into a wider public knowledge some decades ago. I had vaguely heard of him, due to my interest in conspiracy theories and the paranormal, but just now became enthralled after reading Berlitz's book about the Philadelphia Experiment.

The more Allende tried to disappear, the more he was hunted. The Navy published a book of his strange marginalia, or gloss-writing in a copy of Morris Jessup's UFO book. He seemed to be an unhinged outsider--but apparently the U.S. Navy was concerned about too many connections he drew to their advanced scientific projects.

Obviously I had to google him, to see what his fate had been. He died in Greeley, Colorado, in the summer of 1986. Allende had written about Albert Einstein's work on the Unified Field Theory, speculating that the physics had been applied by the Navy. (The Phili-Experiment was supposed to have been concerned with invisibility fields and teleportation.)

I can't really get my head around Unified Field Theory (unifying electromagnetism, gravity, and space-time), but I am struck with space intersecting with time. In the mid 80s I saw a fair amount of Greeley, the unprepossessing town where Allende lied low in his final years. In those years I attended the University of Denver, and often took the Greyhound bus to my grandparents in Laramie, Wyoming, spending some weekends. The bus would almost always be waiting or passing through dusty, frozen Greeley in the wee hours. The town was a transit point, a naked lightbulb lonely train whistle night town, a place in between, a netherworld passed through.  I was always happy to arrive at my destination, to drink buttermilk and hear a gentle tick of a clock on the bed stand.