#cornell wilde

He’s in New Mexico with his 20-something daughter to meet with a grizzly old man who has in his possession, what appears to be a full skeleton of a gargoyle! No sooner than the bones are revealed, the shack is attacked and the old man killed.

Wilde and daughter escape, taking the gargole skull with them. After another mysterious attack while driving, they are exhausted and check into a crummy old motel.

The motel owners happens to be.... (wait for it) GRAYSON HALL!

Seeing Wilde, Hall’s Mrs. Parks immediately gets horny. Wilde was quite handsome in his 1940s/50s films where he was often shirtless.

I’ve seen the movie before and I imagined Dr. Hoffman left Collinsport on the run after all her horrible experiments were discovered by the authorities. She ended up using an assumed name in the New Mexico desert. Barnabas promised to join her but he never did. So Julia set her sights on other romantic conquests.

The movie is quite ambitious for a TV movie in the 1970s and the Gargoyle makeup is decent. I’ll discuss it further in y next pose about “Gargoles”.

Actor Scott Glenn plays a dirty bike gang member in a minor role. He would go on to bigger and better things. Most recently he was featured in the first season of Stephen King’s horror series on Hulu - “Castle Rock”.

B

I’ve blogged about the 1945 film Leave Her To Heaven before.  I haven’t changed my overall rating, it’s still a solid B for me, but I wanted to discuss it in terms of noir.

Leave Her To Heaven is a layered story about a captivating woman, played by Gene Tierney and the poor schmuck who falls in love with her, played by Cornell Wilde.  

Much of the film is set outdoors and the ending is soft which got me questioning whether this film even belongs in Noirvember.  So I did a little searching on the internet until I found a blogger that agrees with me.  Shadowsandsatin wrote about Leave Her to Heaven in the blog Noir or Not and said...

“At its core, Leave Her to Heaven offers the murderous Ellen Berent, who lets nothing - not her baby’s life, that of her brother-in-law, or even her own, daunt her obsession with her husband... So your lead femme in Leave Her to Heaven is a beautiful woman willing and able to use her brains as well as her beauty to accomplish a single-minded, far-from-noble goal. Sounds pretty noirish to me.”

There you have it.  

I also want to tell you that I watched this film twice.  Once the regular way and once with the commentary on.  The commentary was given by a film reviewer for ‘Time’, Richard Schickel and by Darryl Hickman, the actor who played the younger brother, Danny.  Schickel commented on the low quality of the acting and narrow range of the cast but made a point to say how beautiful the cinematography was.  The last time I blogged about this film my one complaint was about the color in the film because it felt flat.

The more useful commentary was provided by Darryl Hickman who was 13 when he made this movie.  He made it clear that the director, John Stahl, was not involved in helping the actors be better during the shoot and that Leave Her To Heaven had actors that needed help.  Hickman also talked about the cinematography done by Leon Shamroy.  He pointed out particular shots and explained how long each set up would have taken to get the level of precision that was achieved.  Technicolor was new and was supposed to be prettier than reality which explains why it looks two-dimensional to me.  But I gained an appreciation for the aesthetic once Hickman explained what it took to get there.  It bothers me some that the two people they selected to give commentary about this movie didn’t like the film very much.  The best thing they could say about it was that it was pretty.

“Gargoyles” Part 5 (Spoilers)