Roger Corman

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Strange, Small & Forgotten Films: The Intruder (1962)

July 19, 2011 in Film, Videos | Permalink

It’s difficult to fathom what would have become of the career of schlockmeister Roger Corman if The Intruder, his incendiary 1962 melodrama about race baiting during the tense moments of the Civil Rights Movement, hadn’t been such an unreleasable flop. Rather than failing because of incompetence, the movie never made its mark because it was too searing a statement about too raw a subject, its dialogue too frank to easily take.

Adam Cramer (William Shatner) describes himself as a social worker, but he’s really an antisocial one. The Elmer Gantry of racial divisiveness, the white-suited Cramer storms into a small Southern town on the eve of court-ordered school integration and quickly puts his oratory skills to work. The locals spit more racial epithets than they do tobacco juice, but they’ve become resigned to the change in the air even if they don’t like it. But Cramer senses that there’s rabble to be roused, and his passionate pleas soon have the townsfolk in a lather.

Even the most liberal person in the community, the newspaper editor Tom McDaniel (Frank Maxwell), was against the forced integration, but after a black church is burned to the ground, he has a change of heart. But the interloper quickly has the scribe outnumbered and McDaniel and the black students reporting for class at white schools may be in grave danger.

Despite some writerly plot twists, Corman’s feel for the material and Shatner’s scary intensity make this picture one of the finer B-movies you’ll ever see. But it was a one-and-done reach for greatness by the director. When The Intruder proved too tough a sell, Corman resigned to be satisfied as an entertainer who buried anything meaningful very deep in the subtext. The material he worked with was never so rich again, and his sharp eye for composition on display here grew fuzzier as the screenplays grew worse. Of course, if he hadn’t turned to profitable dreck, Corman likely wouldn’t have been in a position to have midwifed filmmaking careers for Scorsese, Coppola and Bogdanovich, among others. But no matter what is and what might have been, The Intruder remains a testament to Corman’s early abilities.• (The Intruder just became available for streaming on Netflix.) 

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Strange, Small & Forgotten Films: Targets (1968)

May 12, 2010 in Film | Permalink

Bogdanovich saved cash on the cast by playing across Karloff as filmmaker Sammy Michaels.

“I am big, it’s the pictures that got small,” protests Norma Desmond in Sunset Blvd., but faded horror icon Byron Orlok (Boris Karloff) has a bitter riposte for her in Targets. “It’s not that the films have gotten bad,” he says with lacerating self-awareness, “it’s that I’ve gone bad.” The self-described “museum piece” was once the genre’s greatest star, but by the 1960s Orlok knows that Hollywood is no country for old men. His quaint spookiness can’t compete with the era’s very real and chilling newspaper headlines, which are drenched with more blood than any vampire could ever drink.

Orlok is retiring from showbiz as soon as he reluctantly fulfills one last  personal appearance at a Los Angeles drive-in. But his swan song may sound more like a death rattle if the party is interrupted by Bobby Thompson (Tim O’Kelly), a fresh-faced insurance salesman from a middle-class Angeleno family who is in the midst of a killing spree. Toting a shoulder-bag full of high-caliber arms, Bobby descends on the drive-in the night of Orlok’s farewell, hoping to up his body count.

Peter Bogdanovich was so desperate to break into directing that he made this movie for Roger Corman, despite the numerous obstacles that accompanied the assignment: He only had Karloff’s services for two days, the film was shot on a a micro budget and the fledgling auteur was under strict orders to save money by incorporating some footage from Corman’s own schlocky 1963 flick, The Terror. Despite these challenges, the writer-director turned out a sharp-eyed view of the decade, one of the few times in his career he’s managed to speak to his time rather than relying on the nostalgia of period pieces. Karloff was never bitter like Orlok, but the role is especially poignant because it’s based on his own ebbing career and was his final good role. Like Orlok, Karloff had outlived his fame and seen his career assassinated by time itself. (Available from Netflix and other outlets.)

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