The mermaid of Venice (Beach)

We see lonesome seaman Johnny Drake (Dennis Hopper) on shore leave, in dress whites, smoking on a Venice Beach footbridge, wondering where to go. He loiters in a drug store, checks his weight for something to do, smiles for the photo booth, a handsome young orphan who’s done little, been almost nowhere, and wants to know who he is, or is going to be. Later in the bar a jazz band is playing. Johnny doesn’t know whether to drink from the bottle or the glass. He sits beside the drummer and from that vantage point sees a woman all alone. Her name is Mora and she’s the mermaid in a sideshow. He wants to talk to her but she wants to hear the music. He manages to walk her to her little apartment over the merry-go-round. She won’t invite him up but they make a breakfast date. A peculiar romance has begun and everything feels captivatingly eerie. Mora seems nearly angelic but people warn Johnny off her—her last two boyfriends vanished and turned up dead. Doesn’t Johnny know that sirens lure sailors to their doom? Mora confesses she believes herself the descendant of sirens. And by about now it becomes clear that Night Tide (1961) is a descendent of Cat People (1942), the first of many atmospheric horror films Val Lewton made for RKO, and a most welcome variation on a rich and wondrous theme.

I first saw Night Tide on a dying VHS tape as a Hopper-obsessed teenager. Its recent restoration has been followed up with a DVD/BD release from Kino, and the film is actually stronger than I remembered. Hopper’s excellent, very early in his career yet already he’s got that strange alertness to the alien in ordinary things. He chews gum like it’s a secret project. His Johnny is both credulous and suspicious of everything—except those things he should genuinely fear. “Guess we’re all a little afraid of what we love,” he says at one point, but the appeal of Johnny is that he doesn’t yet know what to love or fear.

Night Tide was the debut feature of Curtis Harrington, a fascinating figure. By this point he’d already written a book on Josef von Sternberg, been mentored by Maya Deren, collaborated with James Whale and Kenneth Anger, and made numerous experimental shorts and a documentary about the work of artist Marjorie Cameron, who was also an occultist and the wife of Jack Parsons, the rocket engineer and cohort of Aleister Crowley. Cameron inhabits Night Tide’s most enigmatic role, one of its most overt call-backs to Cat People, an older spectral woman who appears to Mora, most memorably during a moonlight beach dance, and speaks to her in some language only Mora understands. Even after the film’s resolution, Cameron’s character remains a mystery, and the scenes in which she features are weird, sexy, and beautifully photographed, like so much of this film, a gem of early ’60s low-budget spookiness nearly on par with Carnival of Souls (1962).

Filmmaker Curtis Harrington

Kino’s disc has a relaxed but hugely informative audio commentary from Harrington and Hopper, both now deceased, and some terrific interviews with Harrington, including one from some appealingly oddball old cable show. Those compelled to look deeper into Harrington’s life and work can check out the book Nice Guys Don’t Work in Hollywood and a DVD/BD entitled The Curtis Harrington Short Film Collection, both of which were published last year by the mighty Chicago record label Drag City. 

                    

How science made a monkey out of Dr. Jessup

Did seeing Altered States (1980) on VHS help prompt my teenage enthusiasm for drug experimentation? I’m fairly sure that Aldous Huxley, Rimbaud, myriad musicians and the Beats probably beat it to the punch, but the film’s protagonist, played by William Hurt, certainly seemed to encapsulate precisely the sort of dazzled longing for chemical-induced transcendence that wooed by hungry young consciousness. Until he goes ape, at which point things get pretty silly. But that’s nearly two-thirds into the movie, and by then it already had me. I still retain enormous affection for Altered States and am happy for whatever excuse to revisit it. 

Hurt remains central to the movie’s appeal, his baby-blues and beatific arrogance. He introduced a new, liberal ideal of Aryan beauty, ambition and intelligence. He must have been pleased that for his big screen debut he would play an irresistible genius. Eddie Jessup is a whiz-kid professor spending all his spare time in a sensory deprivation tank, studiously chronicling his head-trips to his dutiful bearded lab buddy Bob Balaban. The movie starts with Jessup just floating there in the tank in silence, the embryonic hero-shaman. His next big entrance has him surrounded by warm white light in the threshold of a party full of pot-smoking academics halfway through the organ solo of ‘Light My Fire.’ He quickly corners, or rather kitchens, Emily (Blair Brown) the second-smartest-prettiest person in attendance; within hours he beds her, the sex accompanied by religious visions; post-coitally he confesses his psychic need, the childhood realization on his father’s deathbed that death is a harrowing void, so best to break on through to the other side while still kicking; within two months Emily’s proposing marriage to him.

Flash-forward to prestige gigs for both at Harvard, two kids and a martial crisis, and Jessup’s off to the arid Mexican north to hang with Indians and swallow some bubbling brown hallucinogenic concoction that looks like mole but seems meant to resemble ayahuasca. (Wrong hemisphere, but whatever.) The stamp of director Ken Russell, maestro of overstatement, is most clearly seen in the hallucination sequences, which are largely very literal-minded and corny, though there are startling moments, such the extended sequence in which Jessup and Emily lay still on a cave floor, in fetal and sphinx poses, respectively, while a sandstorm first engulfs them and then erodes their bodies down to dust. That bit is about as inspired as Altered States gets, but let us praise the movie for its likable supporting characters, such as Charles Haid's ornery, perpetually gasket-blowing doctor-assistant, and its remarkable fleetness, the way it gallops through exposition without stopping for breath.

The script and source novel were by Paddy Chayefsky, though he would withdraw his name from the finished product, for reasons one can guess at. I haven’t read Chayefsky’s book and thus can’t comment on Russell’s treatment of it, but could anyone, even, say, David Cronenberg, have convincingly realized the story’s final third, in which weird science makes a monkey out of Jessup? Taking more and more of the Mexican brew and spending more and more time in the deprivation tank, Jessup learns the hard way that regressive states of consciousness can be externalized. The movie becomes a little like Cat People (1942/82), with Jessup morphing into a hairy, aphasic version of Iggy Pop, going to the zoo, and slaughtering a goat before waking up naked, incarcerated and temporarily amnesiac. Eventually the movie remembers that it’s actually a love story, which is sort of endearing. Yes, yes, it’s mostly ridiculous, but I can still fantasize a version co-directed by Stanley Kubrick and Henry Jaglom, and I can still let myself fall under its audacious, strangely earnest spell. The movie's title being an instruction as much as a description, it helps, of course, to get totally loaded first.