Bad Movies You Love

[moira finnie]

I am sorry if you feel that I am criticizing a film that you cherish, that wasn't my intention. Unintentionally funny isn't the equivalent of "stupid" to me, ChiO, but Fuller's movies, some of which I like--have an eccentric quality, especially in this one, and there are absurd characters throughout this deliberately pulpy movie that are strangely amusing. One other reason this movie strikes me funny is that elements of Shock Corridor have been imitated ad nauseum in other (lesser) movies in the half a century since it was made. Maybe I would have taken it more seriously if I had seen this movie when it first came out.

I like some of Fuller's movies, particularly Pickup on South Street, The Steel Helmet, Fixed Bayonets and The Big Red One. I liked Park Row too. Wish that Fuller had done more movies about the press.

[ChiO]

I am sorry if you feel that I am criticizing a film that you cherish, that wasn't my intention.

Heavens...why would I care if someone criticizes a film that I cherish? I was merely challenging the categorization of SHOCK CORRIDOR as an unintentionally funny, bad movie (albeit one that may be loved).

Perhaps I should never look at this thread because I don't accept its general premise and I don't promote its psychological impact. I can't accept that there is a bad movie that I love. If I love it, then I found it to be good. A bad movie is a boring movie, and I don't make a practice of loving boring movies. Regardless of whatever else it may be, SHOCK CORRIDOR is not a boring movie. The psychology of the exercise is also interesting. If someone says,"I think XYZ is a great movie," but you don't like it, I think that most people can let that slide; there generally isn't an impulse (or it's a weaker or less prevalent impulse) to tear down something that you know someone else loves. But if someone says, "I think XYZ is a bad movie," and you love it, I think that most people react differently.

Confession (it's Lent after all): The first time I saw SHOCK CORRIDOR, my jaw hit the floor in between saying, "What the #*@^#@!!!" It was my first Fuller movie (I don't count seeing MERRILL'S MARAUDERS at the drive-in with my parents when it was released). I've since come around.

A first to the face will do that.

[Mr. Arkadin]

Perhaps I should never look at this thread because I don't accept its general premise and I don't promote its psychological impact. I can't accept that there is a bad movie that I love. If I love it, then I found it to be good.

That was my reasoning as well, but I still looked at it.

[knitwit45]

Don't you think, fellas, that the premise is that there are movies considered to be 'bad' by general consensus, but for some reason, to be explained in this thread, that one really loves that 'bad' movie. Or am I missing the point here? Or are you guys missing the point here? Or does it matter? It's early and I need another cuppa...

I think we all are saying the same thing, but coming at it from different angles. Ok, I'll go back to my little corner and just listen..

[moira finnie]

Good points, knitty. We all perceive movies differently. I just tend to think of the movies we are discussing here as "guilty pleasures," but of course, I realize that one person's idea of a bad movie that can be fun to watch might be seen as art by another individual.

[moira finnie]

There are LOTS of *SPOILERS* below, so please don't say you haven't been warned...


Did anyone see Parrish (1961) over the weekend on TCM? I suppose this movie may be someone's favorite, so don't take offense--but holy cats, what a doozie--overstuffed with tobacco, marriages of convenience, agronomy instruction, illegitimate babies, arson, empire building, and even a trip to the North Pole (honest). I think I am going to have to get a copy of this and place it in a hallowed spot on the shelf next to Susan Slade and Rome Adventure. Not only does this movie seem to be the nadir of director Delmer Daves' career, but it contains the worst performance I've ever seen the usually fine Karl Malden give in anything, (The Streets of San Francisco was Shakespeare compared to this).

In a movie that had the tagline "More than a boy...not yet a man!" Troy Donahue gave his most stolid performance yet as a young man who moves to tobacco country in Connecticut with his mama (Claudette Colbert, in her last feature film). Their presence immediately stirs passions on the reportedly "idealistic" Sala Post's farm (Sala is played by my favorite eunuch, Dean Jagger). Several of the coarse womenfolk start yelling catcalls at the dumbfounded Troy, who hesitatingly asks the field hands for their advice on growing tobaccy ("It's just like a baby" one crone tells him). Among the workers is a nubile, perfectly coiffed Connie Stevens, trying to undress Troy with her eyes!! Despite Sala's opposition to having a fox near his hen house, Troy is hired to work in the fields while his Mom tries to be a duenna of sorts to the "stormy, passionate" daughter of Dean Jagger, (Diane McBain) whose return from college is imminent. To muddy the water a bit further, Karl Malden appears as a tobacco mogul named Judd Raike, who is hellbent on taking over the land of the smaller tobacco growers because, apparently, their tobacco is better than his--making a "perfect wrapper" for a cigar. Clearly, this movie came out before the Surgeon General's Report on Tobacco in 1964.

Sharon Hugueny and Diane McBain make a Troy sandwich.

Connie is immediately able to seduce Troy, (again!? this must have been getting monotonous after Susan Slade, made in the same year as this epic). This time she comes on to him faster than tobacco poisoning causes him to break out in a rash--enabling Connie and Troy to share my favorite seduction scene in the movie--who knew that calamine lotion was an aphrodisiac?


Connie is soon preggers, but it turns out that Parrish is not the baby daddy. Diane McBain also keeps trying to seduce Parrish, but they look too much alike--both blondes with blue eyes whose peepers are photographed through a vaseline smeared lens and with a special key light by the gifted Harry Stradling, Sr., whose use of color and framing gives this film a magnificent (if empty) veneer. After awhile it is hard to tell them apart in close-up. As my movie-hating sis pointed out, Diane is also hampered by the fact that she seems to be majoring in Snobbery at her exclusive college (which is apparently somewhere near Albany) with a minor in Fish-wifery, which comes in handy when she marries one of Karl Malden's feeble excuse for a son. Actually, an actress I'd never seen before, (consciously) Sharon Hugueny, who was the only girl with a glimmer of intelligence in the herd, playing the brunette Paige Raike (where did they get these names?) was the most interesting of the bunch--even if she did belong to something called "The Girl's League," that seemed to be reminiscent of the Hitler Youth (this gang showed up to help on Dean Jagger's tobacco farm singing a ditty that sounded suspiciously like the Horst Wessel Song). At least she seemed to have half a brain.

Of course, Karl Malden's attention is diverted by the genteel, beautifully dressed Claudette, (except for one hideous evening gown). Soon Colbert becomes his gracious consort, overlooking his terrible temper, obsessive behavior, contemptuous treatment of his spineless male offspring and her son, his vulgar nouveau riche antics, and the fact that Karl is a decade younger. One of the choicer moments comes when Karl and Claudette get hitched and a newspaper with a giant headline (the kind reserved for "War Declared!") reading "Judd Raike To Marry Sala Post Servant" appears on screen as kettle drums reverberate and--apparently--this corner of Connecticut shudders. This moment and several other dramatic peaks are accompanied by Max Steiner's most comically bombastic score, with his music overwhelming and shoring up every event in the movie. Max, Max, where is the gentleness and subtlety of Johnny Belinda, Since You Went Away and Now, Voyager? This tuneful mishmash is like a rejected hybrid of Gone With the Wind and A Summer Place.

If only Colbert had more to do! When she finally tells Karl where he can get off, this flare of pique seems but an echo of this good actress' abilities, on display in films for three decades prior to this flick. I am ashamed to report that I kept thinking "Hmmm, Claudette, you've had Boyer, McCrea, Milland, MacMurray and more on screen. What are you doing here?"

Two things in this movie made it great watching for my guilty soul:

1.) The detailed depiction of the farm life, with the planting, nurturing, problems and harvesting of the sole crop that occupies these farmers--tobacco. I love anything to do with farming and that part of the movie was great. Of course, it never occurs to anyone to grow anything other than tobacco, and no one shows up from the local farm bureau to suggest that diversification might be a more reliable way to make a tenuous living at this occupation (and it would be easier on the land).

2.)
Thank God for Dub. The delightfully cheerful Dub Taylor as Connie Stevens' white trash Daddy whose household consists of wives, mothers, deaf grandmothers and other scene-stealers--though no one can compete with Dub's ebullient love of acting. My favorite Dub moment comes when he sticks his gnarly head into his grandchild's bassinet and claims that the illegitimate tyke looks just like a Raike (one of Malden's scions was the Pop)--though the little butterball baby looked so much like Dub Taylor, I expected the kid to start speaking with a pronounced southern accent.

Btw, none of the older male characters have recognizable names, but have the kind of cognomen made up by the same people who name soap opera characters: Parrish McClean (Donahue) meets Sala Post (Jagger) and Judd Raike (Malden).

The greasy-voiced narration of this trailer might convey some of the irresistible ickiness embedded in this piece of celluloid:

[youtube][/youtube]

[knitwit45]

Moira, your review was tons more fun than the movie! I remember seeing this in college, and thinking that Claudette Colbert was in the wrong movie...

thanks for the laugh of the day!

[Lzcutter]

In a movie that had the tagline "More than a boy...not yet a man!" Troy Donahue gave his most stolid performance yet as a young man who moves to tobacco country in Connecticut with his mama (Claudette Colbert, in her last feature film).

M,

I had no idea that you could grow tobaccy in Connecticut. All these years, I thought it needed a warmer, more humid clime than that.

You learn something new everyday here at the Oasis!

[klondike]

Lynn, smear some more flubber on your disbelief, & dig this:
When the fam & I moved back to Vermont from Washington State in '95, one of the places that we considered buying for our new homestead, was a big ol' river-bend farm up in Weathersfield Bow, which is just 11 miles north of Bellows Falls . .
Anyway, long-story-short, while researching the place's agrarian history one July afternoon with our realtor, we discovered that its highest crop income had been from 47 acres of tobacco, planted quite successfully for lucrative cash yields, from the early 1880's until just before the outbreak of World War I.
Chopping that into a metaphor salad, how ya like them apples?

[mrsl]

.
You're talking about me back in the day when you bring up things like Parrish, Susan Slade, and others, but you have to realize these were all take off on Peyton Place. Not the story itself, but the turgid love scene, the perfect hair, the rich houses with affluent people wearing the very nth in fashion, etc. I'm pretty sure Sharon Hugeny was Priscilla to Kurt Russell's Elvis, and was in most of those teen movies like A Summer Place, Roman Adventure, and others.

Moira, I did laugh at some of your remarks, and agree with the names business, but all of these movies are my guilty pleasures because they take me back to the carefree, unmarried days before meeting Mr. Jerk. All of the people in these movies were the folks that populated all of those Warner Bros. detective shows of the 60's, like 77 Sunset Strip, Hawaiian Eye, etc. Considering that this was Claudette's last film, perhaps she saw a vision of things to come and decided to hit the road.

Don't get me wrong, I don't have them on tape or anything where I pull them out now and then, but I do watch when I see them listed because they are fun to watch, and Troy was eye candy if nothing else. He never lost that stiffness in front of the camera. He guested on something shortly before he died and except for a few pounds, and a bit thinner hair, he was the same, including the camera fright.

[MissGoddess]

Diane McBain is on "I Dream of Jeannie* (on TVLand) right now, playing some flame of Tony's.

[klondike]

. . and Troy was eye candy if nothing else.

Yup, and what a shame that the one time he stepped out of that rigid casting box back then was when he played Frankie, the schizo-brutal Ivy League racist in 59's Imitation of Life.
So chilling to watch him come seething after Susan Kohner under cover of night, and then "knuckle walk" her all over that side street . .

[JackFavell]

I'm still laughing at the fact that they had to leave Connecticut to find a snobby girls school.

And the idea of large scale farming in CT. is terribly funny, I've never seen a farm here bigger than a city block. I wonder who those good looking actors got to heft the granite out of the soil? though flowering tobacco grows great here, as witness my garden last year - non-stop blooms and huge leafy mounds.

Great review, Moira - I'm going to have to rent a copy, buy some cheap wine, and make an evening of watching this one. It may beat out Ring of Fire as my new guilty pleasure.

[moira finnie]

I'm so happy that you guys got a laugh out of this one too! I have an expanded version of this post, with more pics, background info and quotes from several of the actors caught in this "spectacular" here on my blog. Among other things, I made the discovery that Jack Warner--whose trolley must have been off its tracks that day--had originally cast Warren Beatty to play the Troy role, with Elia Kazan as director, and--holy moley--Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh in the Malden and Colbert parts. Tidbits like this prompted me to expand on this movie encapsulation, if you can't get enough of this poppycock. (Warren was reportedly quite crushed to have been passed over eventually).

I can't imagine why any of those individuals passed on the story, can you?