INFAMY UPON INFAMY - The Disembodied Head Craze of 1957 - 1959, Part II

I WAS A TEENAGE FRANKENSTEIN (1957)

"After I've grafted on your new face, life for you will really begin."

The iconic American International Pictures, or AIP, was only in its third year of turning constant profits on low-budget genre pictures like Day the World Ended and It Conquered the World when either producer Herman Cohen, producer Alex Gordon, or AIP co-founders James Nicholson and/or Samuel Z. Arkoff (depending on whose story you believe) shrewdly decided to kill two birds with one stone. "I had heard that 62 percent of the movie audience was between fifteen and thirty," Cohen recalled, "and I knew that the movies that were grossing well were horror and rock'n'roll pictures. So I decided to combine them with an exploitation title."

The result was AIP's most successful movie for many years to come, 1957's I Was a Teenage Werewolf. The movie catapulted star Michael Landon to fame as Tony Rivers, a student with serious anger management issues who, on the advice of police Detective Donovan (Barney Phillips, long a Ranting Russell fave), becomes a patient of "prominent" consulting psychologist Dr. Alfred Brandon, played by Whit Bissell. Outwardly warm and sympathetic, Dr. Brandon is in fact diabolical and quite mad ("Mankind is on the verge of destroying itself. The only hope for the human race is to hurl it back into its primitive dawn, to start all over again!") and uses hypnosis, scopolamine and his secret serum to "regress" Tony into his primitive state - a werewolf. As a werewolf Tony has even worse anger management issues and kills five (including Brandon, his assistant, May 1957 Playboy playmate Dawn Richard and a dog) before Donovan and an officer shoot him dead. "It's not for man to interfere in the ways of God," says Donovan, echoing Harvey B. Dunn's infamous line at Bride of the Monster's conclusion, "He tampered in God's domain."

The profits piled up so immediately that the sequel was out within a scant five months. Directed by Herbert L. Strock (who went on to direct, uncredited, 1980's Monstroid, which could really use a special edition Blu-ray release at this point), I Was a Teenage Frankenstein finds Professor Frankenstein (no first name) plotting to construct "a youth" out of various body parts. Attentive viewers will note that Professor Frankenstein is played by none other than Whit Bissell, who played Dr. Brandon in I Was a Teenage Werewolf. Different movie, same whack-job scientist. So same, in fact, that Bissell paraphrases himself from the earlier movie. "You've been more than an assistant on other occasions," he browbeats Joseph Mell in I Was a Teenage Werewolf. "Accomplice would be a better word!" Then five months later: "...That other experiment that you assisted me about a month ago," he browbeats Robert Burton in I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, "made you my ally. Of course I could you another and uglier word - accomplice. But I won't."

Appropriating the mangled corpse of a teenager who was conveniently thrown from his car in a head-on collision right in front of his house, Professor Frankenstein determines all he needs are two hands and a right leg to complete his patchwork youth. And hey, presto! A local track team's chartered plane crashes into a nearby mountain. The Doctor and his assistant, Dr. Karlton (played by the aforementioned Robert Burton), steal the needed limbs from the cemetery in the dead of night, attaching them to their "teenage marvel" in record time. The marvel's face, however, is a still a disfigured, grotesque mess from the accident. A replacement face is needed, so the Professor has his teen creature kill a boy at the local lover's lane.

And this is where we arrive at our Man Without a Body, disembodied-head moment. Back at the Professor's house, he and the creature stand next to a covered birdcage. The Professor uncovers it to reveal the head of the freshly-killed youth:

This face is quickly grafted onto the creature, completing his transformation into Professor Frankenstein's ideal young man:

What struck the Ranting Russell staff about I Was a Teenage Frankenstein was how much further it pushed the envelope than its predecessor. I Was a Teenage Werewolf ran afoul of church groups and moralists during this era of juvenile delinquency fears, but I Was a Teenage Frankenstein is far more graphic and mean-spirited. Professor Frankenstein is a bona fide sociopath, with no thought or empathy for anyone but himself. He delights in
inflicting pain on his creation to remind it who's in control. He slaps his fiance (Phyllis Coates, four years after playing Lois Lane in The Adventures of Superman) for no real reason and has the creature murder her later, feeling absolutely no remorse. Killing a boy necking with his girlfriend is simply a justifiable means to an end - his glory, when the scientific world sees his achievement. Incidentally, he can only reveal his achievement by taking his creation back to England, because here in the States he'll be convicted of first-degree murder once the lover's lane kid's parents see their boy's face on this towering scientific feat. Frankenstein's solution is to dismember the creature and ship it across the Atlantic in crates with false bottoms. Easy peasy.

And the gore: he bullies Dr. Karlton into helping him with his deadly project, and we watch them remove the car crash victim's hand and leg with a bone saw:

And a distinct Man Without a Body-type illogic and surrealness pervades the picture. Professor Frankenstein is English but has no accent. He rents a house, yet has somehow managed to build a basement morgue and alligator pit below the morgue without the owner knowing. The alligator pit is, naturally, where he dispenses with all human detritus. The severed limbs get thrown in, as does his fiance's body, as does the Professor himself when the creature turns on him in the film's final minutes. Follow the logic here: it's less work digging out an alligator pit, filling it with water and stocking it with an alligator (why would that raise any eyebrows?) than to simply dispose of the severed limbs in a dumpster or out in the desert.

Whit Bissell: just plain evil

Additionally, the only thing the Professor replaces on his teenager's body are the hands and a leg. Yet, the reanimated corpse, which speaks and remembers the Bible, is otherwise a blank slate. Why doesn't he have his old personality?

Because this is the Disembodied Head Craze of 1957 - 1959 kids, and the finer details don't matter. Critics may have dismissed these movies, but Herman Cohen's target audience ate it up and AIP laughed all the way to the bank. They were certain that so long as there were mad scientists, disembodied heads and pretty dames, the rest would take care of itself. And boy howdee, did it ever. The "I was a teenage..." moniker became part of the cultural landscape, and continues to be utilized in various forms to this day.

One last curious aspect of this film is that despite its status as a commodity created solely to sell tickets for AIP in 1957 before moving on to the next commodity, it remains, thanks to a nearly throwaway Whit Bissell line, a remarkably topical and culturally relevant movie here in the 21st century. "I plan to assemble a human being using parts and organs from different cadavers," Professor Frankenstein tells Dr. Karlton in the movie's opening minutes. "...Simply an intelligent adaptation of the principle of selective breeding. After all," he continues, "if you breed morons you beget morons. But when brilliant people mate..."

The Professor has waded, however briefly, into the seismic controversy of eugenics, the shame of a nation whose infamy reverberates to this very day. Did writers Herman Cohen and Aben Kandel (credited under the pseudonym Kenneth Langtry) intentionally embed a swipe at socialists in Frankenstein's dialog? Is the Professor himself - narcissistic, callous - a stand-in for America's liberal elite, and Karlton the moral opposition (the hapless Karlton, all but extorted into assisting Frankenstein, has had enough by movie's end, telling the Professor he's "inhuman" and won't be part of his "fiendish plan" to dismember the creature)? Karlton, after all, survives, and Frankenstein gets fed to the alligator. As we've always maintained, that's the beauty of true art: it operates on numerous levels all at once.

INFAMY UPON INFAMY - The Disembodied Head Craze of 1957 - 1959, Part I

W. Lee Wilder probably wasn't thinking about the possibility of sparking a fad in 1957. At 52, the Austrian-born producer/director had only directed a dozen low-budget movies, many written by his son Myles, and lived deep in the shadow of his younger brother, Billy. The epically talented Billy Wilder was already something of a Hollywood legend in his own time by 1957, having either written or co-written almost 50 movies, and directed three stone-cold classics, Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, and The Seven Year Itch.

That level of success hadn't trickled down to W. Lee. If the former New York City purse maker harbored any illusions about becoming one of the industry's overnight successes, they were quickly quashed after he made it to Hollywood in 1945. There, the elder Wilder brother found himself not at Paramount or 20th Century Fox, but Republic Studios, on Hollywood's Poverty Row. Not one to complain about life's inherent unfairness, W. Lee formed his own production company and began making movies, producing The Glass Alibi in 1946, and directing The Pretender in 1947.

He came tantalizingly close to the big time, working with stars Lloyd Bridges (Three Steps North), Conrad Nagel (The Vicious Circle), and June Havoc (Once a Thief). But after directing sixteen musical shorts between 1949 and 1950, the older Wilder settled into a 19-year string of low budget programmers, many of which are familiar to fans of Psychotronic cinema: Phantom from Space (1953), Killers from Space (1954), The Snow Creature (also 1954), and The Omegans, an almost forgotten 1968 film starring Ingrid Pitt.

So initiating a low budget bandwagon was probably furthest from the director's mind as he flew to London to begin work on his latest film.

But spark a fad W. Lee seemingly did. The movie he directed in London, 1957's The Man Without a Body, follows the exploits of vainglorious businessman Karl Brussard, and his pursuit of a replacement brain for his own, after being diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor.

Forty-three minutes into the picture we are treated to the sight of a disembodied head sitting on a table, conversing with two scientists. The more detail-oriented staffers at Ranting Russell pointed out that this scenario - or at least people hanging around a table looking at a disembodied head - reoccurred only six months later in I Was a Teenage Frankenstein.

Staff quickly compiled a list of six other similar movies, all filmed within two years: Frankenstein's Daughter (1958), The Thing that Couldn't Die (1958), The Head (1959), The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake (1959), House on Haunted Hill (1959) and The Brain that Wouldn't Die (completed 1959, released 1962).

This is an admittedly minor fad. And maybe the seven disembodied head movies that followed The Man Without a Body can all be written off to random chance, a strange coincidence where, for twenty-four months, fourteen different writers and directors who had no communication with each other produced seven different horror films that were eerily alike.

However it came about, the effect was far-reaching: one of the movies was made in England, and one in Germany. Whatever else, it's a stretch of synchronicity deserving a bit of scrutiny.

THE MAN WITHOUT A BODY (1957)

"You know, it's remarkable it's alive, this head mounted on your assistant's body."

The Man Without a Body has always been easy pickings for self-important movie snobs. You know the type: holier-than-thou, pedantic twits whose due diligence consisted of reading the Medved books and Roger Ebert's I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie and feel safely empowered to garrulously explain to you how a movie is an insult to their superior intelligence, and thus must be made an example of. "...Lack of logical plotting and paper-thin characterization," said one critic. "Banal and amateurish" said another. British critic David Pirie sniffed that it's a "particularly ludicrous piece."

I suppose if we're getting technical about it, The Man Without a Body is, as the crow flies, particularly ludicrous. But that's entirely the wrong mindset for a movie about a businessman who steals Nostradamus' head from his tomb and delivers it to a doctor in London to revive it so the businessman can yell at the head a lot, trying to convince Nostradamus to take his place after he dies of a brain tumor.

In fact, when the concise summary of a movie is "After intentionally giving a selfish, arrogant American robber baron bad business advice, the reanimated head of Nostradamus is surgically attached to the body of a philandering scientist and runs amok in London before being decapitated in a bell tower," we here at Ranting Russell know we've found a movie right in our wheelhouse.

Literature and Cinema profs talk a lot about the "willing suspension of disbelief." This is the litmus test, we're told, as to whether or not a book or movie is valid. If it's well-written, then our willing suspension of disbelief holds - whether we're talking about science fiction or whatever - and the movie is realistic enough that we believe it. This could happen in real life. If it's not well-enough written and dips below that threshold; that is, if it depicts events or scenes that we're not convinced would ever realistically take place, then our suspension of disbelief founders, and we know we're just watching a dumb movie. We don't believe in it anymore. It isn't art.

But our disbelief is always willingly suspended, right? If we know something comes from a writer and director's imagination, then we're already engaging with fiction. That it's make-believe isn't an issue. We don't need movies or books to be the apotheosis of realistic, we just don't want them to suck.  Or to be less negative, we want them to resonate on some level. And there are infinite levels upon which a work of art can resonate, from the simple to the profound.

It's safe to say no one involved with the production of The Man Without a Body expected it would resonate on the "profound" end of that spectrum. That doesn't mean the movie isn't massively engrossing. Whatever else he was, Director W. Lee Wilder was not dumb. He knew Body's premise was way, way off the beaten track. The need for a paycheck may have far outweighed any desire he had to stretch out artistically at the time, but this was still an experienced director with 12 feature-length movies under his belt. The risk was worth it. Wilder aimed to entertain.

And may I just say in the absence of any hyperbole that this is one of the most entertaining movies ever filmed. From his first appearance just moments into the film, George Coulouris - forever entertainment royalty through his association with Orson Welles, the Mercury Theatre, and his role as Thatcher in Citizen Kane - is wonderfully over the top as egocentric businessman Karl Brussard, berating his personal assistant, destroying his unchaste mistress' phone, and boasting about his entrepreneurial moxy ("I built an empire out of nothing and this is the brain that did it" he says, gazing admirably at an x-ray his doctor brought. "I shined shoes and now bankers will fight to lick my boots"). Alas, Brussard has terminal brain cancer. His matter-of-fact doctor (Irishman William Sherwood, with an impeccable American accent) tells him the tumor is inoperable. But never fear - he's read about American doctor Phil Merritt, who's doing experiments in brain transplantation "somewhere in Europe - London, I think."

Off Brussard goes to Europe - London - to Dr. Phil Merritt's office, played with awesome woodenness by New York-born Robert Hutton. Hutton, a veteran of 27 movies and numerous TV appearances by 1957, was just warming up for his second act as an actor beloved by fans of Famous Monsters of Filmland. Over the next 15 years he appeared in The Colossus of New York (1958), Invisible Invaders (1959), Wild Youth (1960), The Slime People (1963), They Came from Beyond Space (1967), Torture Garden (1967), Trog (1970) and Tales from the Crypt (1972). Hutton says he went to W. Lee Wilder's office in Hollywood where the director told him, "If you don't take the job, the hell with you. I'll get somebody else. It's as simple as that." I'd like to think Hutton's giving it about 53% throughout the picture is payback for Wilder's arrogant insouciance.

Here's where the movie's real genius begins: Dr, Merritt wants to make a chart of Brussard's brainwaves, so he leads Brussard with no explanation into his main lab, boasting beakers bubbling with chemicals, machines with wacky lights, hearts and lungs attached to wires and cables, monkey heads on tables, and a disembodied eye in a clamp that looks directly at Brussard. Every Henry Frankenstein trope is here and then some.

Was this actually in William Grote's script? Did Wilder come up with this on his own? This is all Dr. Merritt has in the building where he rents: a small office with his desk, and his lab that is a total horror show. Brilliant stuff.

One of Merritt's assistants, Jean Cramer (played by Julia Arnall, whose brief career included a co-starring stint with Philip Carey in 1961's The Trunk; Carey went on to appear in 1980's Monstroid, which could really use a special edition Blu-ray release at this point) attaches Brussard to an encephalograph to record his brainwaves. Brussard lights up a cigarette, right there in the lab, surrounded by exposed organs hooked up to wires, while Dr. Merritt and his assistants take 5 minutes to conduct a brain transplant on a circus monkey.

THIS is what we're talking about, folks: straight-up, first-rate ENTERTAINMENT. Yes, you read that correctly - circus monkey brain transplant whilst a smoking patient's brainwaves are measured. A commensurate amount of time for an unbelievably complex surgical procedure that's never been done anywhere else in the world? Bah! Having any amount of discretion with a patient you've never even met before when your lab contains things that would get you arrested and stripped of your medical license? Flimshaw! Can you name another movie where this goes on? Here's what Dr. Merritt says after the 5-minute brain transplant is over, and he's pulling his mask off: "Jean, I almost forgot Mr. Brussard. Will you bring him into my office please?"

Dr. Merritt confirms that Brussard's condition is terminal. The wheels are turning in Brussard's head, however, and he hatches his nefarious scheme: stealing a human brain for Merritt to transplant into his head, just as the good doctor did with the circus monkey. The monkey head, you see, had been dead six years. It was Merrit's genius ("Revitalized the tissues, made the brain within function again") that allowed him to transplant its brain into the circus monkey's skull.

Brussard and Dr. Merritt repair to a local pub ("Public Bar" is written on the door) for lunch, where the movie's subplot takes shape: Merrit's other assistant, Lew (played by Sheldon Lawrence, who appeared in four TV shows and six movies in 1958 alone) unwittingly takes Brussard's young mistress, Odette Vernet (played by the fascinating Serbian/British actress Nadja Regin) to lunch... at the same Public Bar as Brussard and Dr. Merritt. Dude already has a terminal brain tumor to deal with, and now this.

After further discussion over what appears to be a Moscow Mule, Brussard knows what he must do: locate a brain ("an intelligent brain - a brilliant brain") to replace his terminal brain ("and it could be made to change its way of thinking... its personality") so he doesn't have to die.

If you, like the rest of the Ranting Russell staff, feel like you missed a key plot point somewhere along the line and need to go back and re-read the movie's synopsis a little more slowly and deliberately, you needn't bother. You haven't missed a thing, as it turns out. This really is Brussard's thinking: I have terminal brain cancer, ergo I replace my diseased brain with a healthy brain and live on. The movie doesn't try to sweep this bit of illogic under the rug at all:

BRUSSARD (asking about the circus monkey): But this new brain - won't it cause the animal to act differently?

DR. MERRITT: Of course. Each brain has its own characteristics.

And it doesn't matter. That none of this makes sense, I mean. That Brussard will die anyway. That the movie's premise is an unqualified sham. That Dr. Merritt doesn't make even a half-hearted attempt to disabuse Brussard of his bizarre, criminal, and totally unscientific quest for a healthy brain. Screenwriter William Grote didn't care about it, and Director W. Lee Wilder didn't care about it.

And neither should you. Because the next thing Brussard does is hunt for his intelligent, brilliant replacement brain in the one place any multi-millionaire businessman with terminal brain cancer worth his salt would immediately go: Madame Tussauds' Wax Museum. Yes, exactly. Where else? He goes on the museum tour, giving W. Lee Wilder a golden opportunity (readily seized) to kill nearly two minutes of runtime. Brussard learns about Henry VIII. He learns about Hitler, Goring, Goebbels and Ribbentrop. He learns about Charles Guiteau. He learns about Jean Calas. He learns about Robespierre. He learns about Marie Antoinette. He learns about the execution of Mary Queen of Scots. But it is when the tour guide gives his description of Nostradamus' wax figure ("The Sphinx of France. The Oracle. The Prophet. The Physician. The Mathematician. The Astronomer.") that Brussard realizes he's found his man. He quickly assembles a crack team of three grave robbers led by a two-bit drunk to fly to France, break into Nostradamus' crypt, and steal his head.

The head is brought to Dr. Merritt in London. You would think the Doctor's reaction, after unwrapping an obviously ancient, mummified head in his office would be "Holy FUCKING JESUS. What the FUCK have you brought me? Have you lost your cancer-addled fucking brain? Lew, restrain Mr. Brussard with whatever blunt object is at hand while I call the authorities and have this criminal ARRESTED. My god. My god..." But no, Merritt quietly marvels at the "professional job" of Brussard's grave robbers, gently chides Brussard that "grave robbing is a crime," and before you know it the head sits in a glass bowl of life-giving chemicals.

Twenty-three days later the head lives! While Lew secretly carries on with Odette, who, in true femme fatale fashion, is openly agitating for Brussard's death, Dr. Merritt and his other assistant, Jean Cramer (German/British model Julia Arnall) plug Nostradamus' head into some cables and bring what they have of him back to life.

This is Man Without a Body's multiverse moment: there were an infinite number of directions Wilder and Grote could take the movie at this moment. Seriously, what does a brilliant surgeon do at this moment? How does he behave? It's not just that a 400-year-old head has been brought back to life and is conversing with whomever's hanging out in the laboratory. That would already be the story of the century. This is so much more - it's Nostradamus, for Pete's sake. The prophet! The physician! This is the most significant scientific leap forward in human history, right? This is absolutely explosive stuff, something that, despite the annoying ethical questions is poses, will immediately catapult the name Dr. Phil R. Merritt into the rarefied pantheon of the most brilliant scientists of all time.

But no, this is just another day at the lab for Dr. Phil R. Merritt and his goofball assistants. Nothing to see here, folks. Lew and Jean sit at the lab table with the head, chatting as they might with someone they just met at a Christmas Eve party. "So you see," Lew says to the head pleasantly, "electricity has enabled us to send voices - even pictures! - through the air."

And from this point on, Man Without a Body picks up the pace and moves from one wacky moment to the next. Dr. Merritt and his assistants leave Karl Brussard in the lab to yell at Nostradamus' head ("You will have to carry on for me! Tell me! Will you remember...? I order you to answer!"). Brussard's neglected mistress gets drunk. Brussard breaks into Merritt's lab in the dead of night to ask Nostradamus' head for business advice. Not knowing that the devious Nostradamus intentionally gave him bad advice, Brussard sells all of his oil stocks and gets routed on Wall Street, losing everything. Livid, Brussard goes on a rampage: he strangles Odette with her own necklace. He chases Lew through the streets and shoots him dead. He refers to himself in the third person. And finally, he destroys the life-giving connections to Nostradamus' head, leaving the pragmatic Dr. Merritt with only one option: attach the head to Lew's body.

In Man Without a Body's final nine minutes, Brussard and the Nostradamus Creature stumble through the streets of London and eventually into an old schoolhouse, where Brussard, incapacitated by his cancer, falls to his death from a bell tower. The Nostradamus Creature follows suit, hanging itself with the bell rope, its head coming clean off. Lew's body also falls from the tower, right on top of Brussard.

And thus ends one of the more bizarre Sci Fi/horror movies of all time, one that, I think we can all agree, should be picked up by Kino Lorber or Arrow and cleaned up for 4K presentation with a commentary track and a "Then and Now: Filming Locations for The Man Without a Body" featurette.

The movie is not without its faults. Wilder's direction is plodding and undistinguished. Irish Cinematographer Brendon Stafford's static shots betray, shall we say, a certain indifference to Wilder's vision. With the exception of Brussard and Odette, the characters are one-dimensional and wholly interchangeable. In one scene that has no bearing on the rest of the movie, Dr. Merritt drives Jean home and she complains that he never pays attention to her. Merritt couldn't be less interested. Jean gets more frustrated. Later, nothing happens. They don't fall in love. They don't kiss. Merritt doesn't ask Jean out for coffee, a la Robin Williams in Awakenings. Nothing. The scene is a one-off, some padding for a movie that doesn't even reach the 90-minute mark.

Through it all, Robert Hutton retains his wooden calm, unflappable in the face of events that would send anyone else running in the opposite direction, screaming until they shredded their vocal cords. Here's where your willing suspension of disbelief gets shattered: not seeing Nostradamus' head sewn onto a dead body and stalking through London at night. Shit, we put a man on the moon. This Nostradamus thing could happen. No, disbelief gets unsuspended watching Dr. Phil Merritt take all of this total insanity in imperturbable stride, calmly smoking cigarettes, making himself available to anyone loitering about who might have one or two questions about the chaos swirling around him.

But there is plenty to enthrall here, not least of which is a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo by Fiend Without a Face's Kim Parker as Brussard's maid. And anyway, we at Ranting Russell love stories. Books, movies, what have you - we love stories, and we're always on the hunt for one unlike any we've heard before. The Man Without a Body stands out. And if you are concerned that the film's basic concept went unfulfilled, allow us to allay your fears: AIP's I Was a Teenage Frankenstein hit theaters six months later, giving us another take on disembodied heads.