FRANKENSTEIN'S DAUGHTER (1958)
We'll begin with the obvious, for the detail-oriented among you: there are no disembodied heads in Frankenstein's Daughter, the 4th Richard E. Cunha-directed movie released within the year of 1958. (He made up for this prolific outburst by only directing two more movies his entire career.)Thing is, they talk a lot about needing a disembodied head, and one is quickly attained by a mad scientist - a Frankenstein, no less - in the movie's first half. And that's more than enough for us to include it on this list. You see, we at Ranting Russell are always looking for any excuse to write about Frankenstein's Daughter. It is a wholly extraordinary little film. Sociopath Oliver Frank, who is in fact Dr. Henry Frankenstein's grandson, works incognito with the bumbling but well-meaning scientist Carter Morton on a drug that will "wipe out all destructive cells and organisms that plague man," thus eliminating all disease.
But the sleazy, predatory Frank has the ulterior motive of following in his grandfather's footsteps and patching together "a perfect being." He has built a body; all he lacks is a head ("It's a head I need!" he rails at Elsu, the movie's hapless Fritz. "Everything's ready except for the brain!"). If Professor Morton can perfect his formula, then Frank is certain he can use it to "preserve the cells of my creation." Therefore, as he keeps an eye out for a suitable head, he surreptitiously tests Morton's formula on Trudy, the Professor's beautiful niece, turning her into a monster.
Not the most profound plot, but trust us, Frankenstein's Daughter is Exhibit A for a movie being far more than the sum of its parts. Writing about The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Roger Ebert pointed out that Sergio Leone establishes a rule in the film's opening that the director follows throughout the picture. What Leone is doing makes no sense - "the ability (for characters) to see is limited by the sides of the frame" - but he doesn't use or discard it to suit his whims. He sticks assiduously with it, so it becomes the movie's own internal logic.
You can make the same argument for director Richard E. Cunha and writer H.E. Barrie (the latter is probably a Cunha pseudonym) with Frankenstein's Daughter. Within 15 minutes, people are behaving irrationally or even stupidly. But it quickly becomes evident that this is the movie's internal logic. Cunha has laid down guidelines and never deviates from them: nothing makes sense in this movie. Nothing. People say things they don't mean. People are cruel to the ones the love. No one trusts any one, and for no particular reason. People do things that in any sane universe would be considered certifiable.
Just off the top of my head:
1) Carter hires Oliver for extremely important, secret work even though he knows absolutely nothing about him;
2) Oliver is rude, disrespectful and disdainful of Carter, yet the old scientist doesn't fire him on the spot, as anyone else in their right mind would do;
3) Carter is unaware of a giant secret door in his own laboratory;
4) Trudy's boyfriend Johnny, who loves her so much he already wants to marry her ("I want to marry you just as soon as I get that promotion to assistant manager") never believes anything at all that she tells him;
5) Police Lt. Boyle immediately opens fire on Trudy in monster form, even though she poses no threat whatsoever and isn't attacking him;
6) After Trudy reverts to human form, her hair is perfect;
7) No one is concerned in the slightest that Suzie has up and vanished after Frank kills her to use her head for the monster;
8) Carter says he has nothing to hide from the police and then immediately breaks into Rockwell Labs and steals Digenerol (and does so again later in the picture);
9) Returning home after his second Digenerol crime spree, the septuagenarian Carter is panting and clutching his chest, calling out for Trudy and clearly suffering a heart attack; yet when Trudy and Frank come to his aid (slumped on the stairs, looking dead) he suddenly comes to and waves them off: "I'm alright now... Don't call a doctor";
10) Oliver Frank is actually Henry (or Victor; same diff here) Frankenstein's grandson, so it stands to reason that the film's events reside within the Frankenstein Shared Universe, and yet Elsu, who worked for Oliver's father, twice erroneously says Frank's father and grandfather never created a woman.
And that's just off the top of my head. Cogitating for a not unreasonable amount of time, I can think of five perfectly solid reasons that you should completely ignore all of Frankenstein's Daughter's online naysayers (a 4.3 out of 10 on imdb, and 31% on Rotten Tomatoes) and watch this movie NOW, and many more times over the rest of your life:
A Call-Out to the Masters
When the monster, assembled from various body parts and supposedly sporting the head of bombshell Sally Todd, but in fact played by 60-year-old character actor Harry Wilson (the picture's makeup man, Harry Thomas, put monster makeup on Wilson, but was never told Wilson was supposed to be the "daughter" in the films title, and was livid when he finally found out: "I could've made [Wilson] look like Sally Todd. I could've put a wig on him") busts out of Carter's house, he makes his way to ASSOCIATED STORAGE COMPANY where he kills a warehouseman played by journeyman bit player Bill Coontz. Not, however, before Coontz grabs a crowbar and says "Wise guy, uh?"
We think everyone can agree that any movie paying homage to Curly and Moe Howard is worth watching at least a dozen times. Writer/director Richard Cunha obviously appreciated the finer things in life.
New Petitions Against Tax
Like many of you, we first learned that prop newspapers in old movies frequently sported the same two subheadlines over and over ("New Petitions Against Tax" and "Building Code Under Fire") through Mystery Science Theater. Here, at the 23:19 mark, Professor Morton waxes elitist about the morning's banner headline (the wonderful "WOMAN MONSTER MENACES CITY!"), accompanied by the Building Code subheadline under his thumb, and half of New Petitions Against Tax under that. Consider them low-budget cinema's Seal of Quality. No picture is complete without them.
Breaking the Fourth Wall
In the spirit of other 1950s & 1960s movies aimed at the teen market, Frankenstein's Daughter contains a musical interlude, where a band plays at Trudy Morton's backyard party. For a scene that eats up a whopping seven minutes of onscreen time, you would think director Cunha would get someone truly rocking - think Little Richard in Catalina Caper or the Strawberry Alarm Clock in Psych-Out - someone hep, man! Someone to get the kids groovin'! So he got the Page Cavanaugh Trio.
Cavanaugh, however, was not a rock and roll man. He was a pop jazz man who fronted a trio that was more at home on shows like Songs by Sinatra and The Jack Paar Show, and had appeared in movies with the likes of Danny Kaye and Doris Day.
But here they are, in a batty old professor's backyard with a bunch of dancing teenagers. What's astonishing is not that Harold Lloyd Jr. unexpectedly steps up and sings two songs with the Trio; it's that their drummer repeatedly breaks the fourth wall. This guy simply cannot stop looking directly at the camera. Around the time of this movie, Page Cavanaugh recorded with at least two well respected drummers, Alvin Stoller and Milt Holland, but I don't think this guy is either one of those two? He's obviously a drummer, and not some ringer Cunha put there to make the band look like they might potentially rock - I mean, the dude puts his head down and goes for it during "Daddy Bird" - but he's so self conscious with the camera rolling that it's impossible not to keep your eyes glued to him:
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| At the 54:00 mark |
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| At the 57:00 mark |
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| At the 1:00:08 mark |
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| At the 1:00:31 mark |
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| At the 1:00:36 mark |
Oh HELL yeah.This was the last film the Page Cavanaugh Trio appeared in. Upon his death in 2008, the New York Times ran an obituary, saying "The trio appeared in several films, including 'Romance on the High Seas' (1948), Doris Day’s first film, as well as 'A Song Is Born,' 'Big City' and 'Lullaby of Broadway.'"
They somehow neglected to mention Frankenstein's Daughter.
Sally Todd
Sally Todd was a blonde from Boone MO who parlayed some modeling work into a brief but extremely memorable acting career. She had already posed as Playboy's Playmate of the Month in February 1957 - the same year she appeared in Roger Corman's The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent and Boris Petroff's Ed Wood-esque The Unearthly - before appearing in Frankenstein's Daughter. Her cheesecake and genre picture bona-fides firmly established, Ms. Todd does what she does best here: suffer miscreants well below her station in life with understandable annoyance (with all due respect to male leads John Ashley and Harold Lloyd Jr., Richard Cunha definitely didn't exactly bring his A-squad for the boyfriends in this picture), and make all of us - men and women alike - curse our pathetic lives for never having been able to tell her that we're hopelessly in love with her.
Put it another way: we'll watch any movie that Sally Todd appears in simply because she's in it. We've always been huge fans of platinum blondes from Hollywood's studio-system era, from Jean Harlow all the way through the as-of-press-time-still-living Mamie Van Doren, but Sally Todd stands out because her short-lived career in front of the camera makes her all the more intriguing. She was also refreshingly candid. Check out her interview in Filmfax magazine with John O'Dowd (issues 123 & 124 from 2010) where she dishes on the making of Frankenstein's Daughter:
"I appreciate that some people enjoy the film, but come on... the movie is terrible. The script was unbelievable and the direction, just like with the Corman film, was almost completely non-existent. In fact, I really believe the director, Richard Cunha, was a myth. I don't think the man ever existed. I didn't know who he was... he was always hiding in the shadows. The other actors and I would come on the set and we would hear a voice in the darkness yell Action,' but we never quite saw who was saying it. Let me tell you, any one of us could have written better lines than what we were given. Every day, (Cunha) changed our lines, then he would run away. The cameraman would say 'Stand here. Do this. Do that.' And that was the extent of our direction."
A few years before Ms. Todd's Filmfax interview, Tom Weaver interviewed director Richard Cunha, who said "It always seems whenever I make a picture, that's the person's last picture!" Luckily for all of us, Sally Todd appeared in a dozen more movies and TV shows after Frankenstein's Daughter, including Dragnet, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, and The Untouchables.
Sadly, her 2015 memoir, Notorious: The Life of a Hollywood Icon, is way, way out of print and rarely shows up online.
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| February 1957 Playboy, from the collection of Ranting Russell founder Russell Bladh |
Donald Murphy
All of us at Ranting Russell are grateful to non-director Richard Cunha for dreaming up the character of Oliver Frank for Frankenstein's Daughter, but really, could anyone else besides Donald Murphy have turned Frank into the slimy, despicable scumbag you love to hate for the picture's entire 85-minute runtime? Murphy clearly relishes breathing life - twisted, loathsome life - into this performance, and in doing so earns a top spot in the pantheon of low budget movie greats.
Primarily a TV actor, Murphy spent his onscreen career on the periphery, working 7th or 8th billed in the 17 movies he appeared in. Even in the one picture where he's crucial to the plot throughout, 1956's Strange Intruder, he's DEAD by eleven-and-a-half minutes in, and never gets to appear onscreen with co-star Ida Lupino. The picture never delivers on its premise, but the gruesome opening act is something everyone should take a moment to watch: Murphy, playing a POW camp's doctor in Korea, uses a dead soldier's right arm to clock the camp's sadistic commandant, and is subsequently tied to a tree - Christ-like - and whipped by two different guards.
He had a terrific aptitude, however, for landing roles in way-out-there movies that are only appreciated nowadays by readers of Psychotronic Video and Filmfax. 1955's Shack Out on 101 is a Red Scare propaganda movie that careens between comic farce and anti-commie craziness (check out Frank Lovejoy's "the apes have taken over" diatribe), and has Murphy acting alongside the gorgeous Terry Moore, Lee Marvin, and Ranting Russell favorites Whit Bissell and Keenan Wynn.
1966's Lord Love a Duck, on the other hand, contains virtually no plot, but gives Murphy a chance to flex his comic chops as Phillip Neuhauser of the First Drive-In Church of Southern California ("Worship in the Privacy of Your Own Automobile"). This movie isn't nearly as good as its cast suggests (Roddy McDowall, Tuesday Weld, Ruth Gordon, Harvey Corman, and a bravura bit part by Mama Lion vocalist Lynn Carey), but Murphy gives it everything's he's got in his brief screen time, telling his Tuesday night girl's group, "Alright now gang, for this evening's discussion we're going to kick around the subject of petting!" and promising next week to unpack "Is it love, or is it sex? Six surefire ways to tell the difference."
With Frankenstein's Daughter, though, Murphy finally got a juicy role that he could sink his teeth into and the man does not disappoint. Sally Todd's assessment is accurate - the script is unbelievable and the direction is nonexistent - but every scene with Murphy is a bona fide slice of cinema gold. Scooby Doo stole from him, that's how ahead of his time he was. At the end of the movie, as the monster closes in on Sandra Knight and John Ashley, Murphy taunts them: "You satisfied now, you meddling kids?" Then, admiring his handiwork: "Is that insanity? Look at her! She lives. She obeys my every command. Oh, everything could've been so simple. But everybody's a meddling fool." Who needs the stupid Mystery Machine when you've got Donald Murphy?
Earlier in the movie he puts on an acting clinic when Sally Todd refuses his romantic advances, and he decides it's best to just kill her and use her head for his experiment.
We can watch the scene where he takes Sally Todd out for some necking and then decides that he's going to kill her and use her head for his experiment all day long. Look at this stuff:
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| Look, you agreed to park here with me! You're deliberately taunting me! I oughta kill you... |
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| Oh... then no one knows you're with me... |
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| ("Don't come any closer... leave me alone!") |
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| I need a brain... I need a brain! |
GOD we love this man.
Frankenstein's Daughter's final 10 minutes are a strange fever dream, as though they simply ran out of script and were forced to improvise, but were too confused by what they'd already filmed to know how to properly end it. Professor Morton dies offscreen with little fanfare; good-guy police detective Bill Dillon is killed by the monster after some more top-notch Donald Murphy psychotic-ness ("My child's quite obedient, don't you think? Kill. KILL HIM"); we are treated to the world's most boring fight, over a minute of screen time with John Ashley fighting the monster with a gurney in between them; the police arrive, see Oliver Frank locking himself in the lab to get away from them, and are no help whatsoever.
Finally, John Ashley grabs a bottle of bottle of "ACID," fires it at the monster point blank - somehow managing to miss completely - and it smashes into Murphy's face. Our boy Frank dies a suitably horrible death.
But the thing that really sets Frankenstein's Daughter apart from all over movies of its era, and the picture's true piece de resistance, comes a little over 20 minutes earlier than this, after the Page Cavanaugh Trio finish their last song. Carter Morton, clueless as ever, emerges from his laboratory in good spirits for once: "The Digenerol is going to work!" Murphy, foregrounded with his back to us, laughs insidiously: "You nutty old man."
Morton has finally had it, and Felix Locher - God rest his soul - does his level best to act outraged. "Now listen Oliver - I've had just enough from you!"
"And I from you," Murphy says, cool and evil. "Only I'm going to do something about it."
Murphy stands up.
"What are you doing?" Locher asks.
"It's very simple. I'm going to kill you."
Murphy walks over to Felix Locher and STRANGLES him.
But Frankenstein's Daughter is no ordinary motion picture, so this is no ordinary murder scene. Murphy's grip is all wrong and instead of gasping with his eyes bulging out as he sinks into oblivion, Locher angrily yells "Stop it," very much more exasperated with Murphy's disrespectful behavior than fearing for his life. Someone knocks at the front door.
Murphy releases Locher who composes himself, walks to the foyer, and lets in Lieutenant Boyle. The Lieutenant politely takes off his hat, calmly informing both men that he must speak with them. They adjourn to the living room.
In any even half-sane universe, Locher would squirm free of Murphy's grasp, throw open the door and scream "ARREST THAT MAN, DETECTIVE! HE TRIED TO KILL ME!"
But Richard E. Cunha sticks to the picture's internal logic: nothing makes sense in this movie. People behave irrationally. And here, an attempted murder no more throws a kink in Felix Locher's day than discovering some leftovers from last week went bad. You compose yourself, toss the leftovers in the garbage, and get on with your life.
Many years ago, the dearly departed Brad Linaweaver was asked if he had a favorite scene in Ed Wood Jr.'s Plan 9 from Outer Space. "Yes, it's 'Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!' For all the science fiction films where the superior alien calmly explains how superior he is - let's call it the Michael Rennie approach - this guy is as upset and freaked out as any human being would be, and then the human response is to punch the guy out. Now, that is a scene unlike anything else in the history of science fiction cinema. It resonates."
Ditto for the scene in Frankenstein's Daughter where, after Oliver Frank tries to kill him in his own house, Carter Morton's response is to simply tell him he's fired. Try and find something else like it in science fiction cinema. It's unique. It resonates.
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