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 when you see 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 no, disbelief gets unsuspended watching Dr. Phil Merritt take all of this total insanity in imperturbable stride, calmly smoking cigarettes, happily 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.

ARTICLE, NOUN I: The Pyx (1973)

The Pyx is an obscure movie adapted from an obscure book written in 1959 by an obscure Canadian professor named John Buell. Buell's short (our Crest paperback edition is 128 pages) hardboiled detective story-cum-satanic cult expose is really more of a novella. The task of committing it to celluloid was taken on by director Harvey Hart, a Canadian better known for his work in TV at that point. It's worth noting that Ranting Russell founder Russell Bladh has always had a soft spot in his heart for Harvey Hart, as the Toronto-born director/producer helmed both the 1st-season Star Trek episode Mudd's Women, and the 1st-season Wild Wild West episode The Night of the Dancing Death. With respect to the latter, Mr. Bladh - before he had a breakdown and was committed - always said it contained one of the greatest lines in television history: "Death is your destination. I hope you had a good look." He actually used to say this randomly to staff, walking around the office.

Struck by such a morbidly catchy line, staff went back and watched the episode, discovering guest star Peter Mark Richman actually says "That is your destination" (he's motioning towards a big hole in the floor, through which he intends to throw Robert Conrad). We decided against telling Russell he misunderstood it. Dude had enough on his plate already.

Buell structured his book with The Present and The Past chapters, beginning in The Present, and alternating a total of six times between the story of junky prostitute Elizabeth Lucy getting set up with the mysterious Mr. Keerson, and Lieutenant Henderson's investigation of Lucy's apparent suicide, falling from the top of an 11-story apartment building. Screenwriter Robert Schlitt, who also spent most of his career in television, ran with this structure, upping the ante to give the story more oomph in a visual medium: instead of just six jumps in time, the movie jumps 26 times, and does so fluidly and with a decent amount of tension, thanks to the editing skills of a then-young Ron Wisman.

The Pyx is a great example of filmmakers adapting a book for the silver screen and having zero interest in casting actors even remotely resembling their literary counterparts. This staff positively adores Humphrey Bogart, but remember The Maltese Falcon's killer opening paragraph, where Hammett writes "Samuel Spade's jaw was long and bony... his pale brown hair grew down - from high flat temples - in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond Satan," and then they cast Bogie as Sam Spade in the movie, who looks nothing whatsoever like a blond Satan?

Here we have the book describing Lieutenant Henderson as "in his fifties, balding and greying, with a tall, heavy, now paunchy body." In the movie Henderson is played by Christopher Plummer, who was 44 at the time, sporting a full head of dark hair, trim and handsome. We grudgingly accept the casting department's decision, as we all love Christopher Plummer. But really...?

Our heroin-addicted heroine is played by Karen Black, just three years after her outstanding turn in Five Easy Pieces, and just a couple of years ahead of her finding Scientology. (Still, Trilogy of Terror wouldn't have been the same without her. - Ed.) Black is outstanding here, lifting up an otherwise prosaic movie with her portrayal of the doomed Elizabeth, who knows something isn't quite copasetic with the john her boss Meg Latimer is setting her up with, but senses it is a very bad situation indeed. Things get weirder when Meg forces her to meet in private with the mysterious Mr. Keerson, played with suitable menace by Jean-Louis Roux, who orders her to disrobe and tell him about her life, all while staring right into her eyes, never ogling her body.

This would already be a wonderfully unpleasant and awkward scene, but director Hart does something interesting here, overlaying the second movement of Bach's Violin Concerto in A Minor (BWV 1041) - and LOUD - over the whole scene in real time. The juxtaposition of one of the most sublimely beautiful pieces of music in history with the evil Keerson psychologically probing naked Elizabeth isn't as unnerving as it should be, but we still give Hart props for trying something wholly unexpected. If you want to see what happens when the perfect piece of classical music is embedded in a movie, check out the POV scene in The Black Cat where Karloff leads Lugosi through the old chart room for long-range guns in the ruins of Fort Marmorus, after showing Lugosi how he's preserved his (Lugosi's) dead wife in an upright glass container. Against the haunting strains of the 2nd movement of Beethoven's 7th Symphony, Karloff delivers an astonishing soliloquy, qualifying for Best Movie Scene No One's Aware Of. Go watch the 1934 Black Cat this instant if you've never seen it.

The upshot to all of this - Keerson hired Elizabeth to be sacrificed in a satanic Black Mass in his penthouse that ends with him tossing her off the top of a high-end apartment building - leads to a final scene that shows you how much potential this little movie had, but just didn't quite deliver on. Lieutenant Henderson tracks Keerson to his penthouse, where the mysterious businessman tells the detective his name isn't Keerson at all. "You know my name. You know it, Henderson. You know it better than anyone. When your wife died in that accident... you were happy. You felt liberated. My name touched you then. You went to confession but it didn't help. You couldn't forget. You didn't want to. You too felt the hypocrisy of the church."

Robert Schlitt's screenplay, serviceable until now, suddenly takes flight here. We discover a heretofore unreferenced catastrophe in Henderson's past (earlier in the film we see Henderson waking up at his girlfriend's apartment, desperate to leave, but no mention of a wife, dead or otherwise), explained with malignant glee by a man who is, apparently, possessed by Satan himself. But Keerson is just warming up: "You keep a little corner of morality inside that stinking soul of yours. A minor delusion to convince yourself that you still know good from evil. But you don't know it, Henderson. You don't know it 'til you touch it. 'Til you open yourself up to the power. When it manifests itself, then you know it. And it's there. It is. It exists. I've seen it. I've become it."

So we find out in the final four minutes of a 111-minute movie that the male lead has a dark secret, and that the villain has a penchant for delightfully evil monologs. We could have used a little more of both during The Pyx's runtime. There was potential here, but the source material was too hesitant to begin with, never doing a true deep-dive into moral depravity and the dark side of the human soul (in a passage from the book that fails spectacularly to convey the vibe of big city crime and despair, Henderson laments the trouble young women like Elizabeth get into, thinking "Mrs. Latimer would want the body, but alive, alive to peddle it, to feed it heroin, to dress it up, to make it entertain lechers who had nothing but money and erotic energy"), and in the final analysis we have to agree with writer John Kenneth Muir: The Pyx just isn't artful enough to make any forceful or memorable point about good and evil, sacrifice and virtue. It doesn't help that parts of the movie (if not all of it) were shot MOS with voices looped in post, lending the film a cheapness it never quite escapes from.

Keerson's spicy soliloquy, incidentally, doesn't appear in the book, and neither does the revelation that Henderson felt relieved when his wife died. In the book Satan appears to be speaking through Keerson and Henderson has to cold-cock him, after which Keerson comes to, yammering semi-coherently ("I can't control it anymore... after she... died it came over me fully, at last, with... I thought I had the power to... it felt as if I was ruling. But it's beyond me now... I can't command... the chaos") before Henderson plugs him.

...And if you're too dull to figure out what went on between Henderson and Keerson in that penultimate scene, "The Secret of The Pyx: A Postscript," by Daniel P. Mannix, is happy to beat you over the head: "The novel you have just read may have left you a bit mystified as to the true character of Keerson and the nature of the rites he intended to perform over the nude body of Elizabeth Lucy. Keerson had become a victim of demoniacal possession and was attempting as a Satanist to perform the terrible ritual of the Black Mass."

Geez, thanks, Mr. Mannix. Damned if I coulda figured that out on my own.

Mannix, incidentally, is the man who wrote Those About to Die in 1958, that Ridley Scott made into Gladiator with Russell Crowe. The movie steers clear of Mannix's asinine postscript and ends depressingly with Henderson standing over Keerson's body.

A pyx, for the Catholic among you, is a locket-like contraption that holds a host.

ARTICLE, NOUN: "The" horror movies of the 70s & 80s

At the behest of Ranting Russell Executive Editor Renee Muller, staff will analyze all horror movies from 1970 to 1980 whose titles are simply "The" and one other word. This silly - nay, ridiculous - concept arose two nights ago whilst staff drank a bottle of Four Roses bourbon after-hours that Sheridan Rowan got as a Christmas present from her aunt. Longtime staffer Isabella Stamps ruminated on her love of Tony Curtis and The Manitou, and new staffer Chone Lee chimed in about how underrated 1972's The Asphyx is, and hey, presto! here comes Renee - who already had two beers before diving into the bourbon, I might add, and probably wasn't thinking clearly - pointing out that both movie titles were simply an article and a noun. How many horror movies can you think of that are just "The" and a noun? she challenged us. We half-drunkenly threw out the obvious ones - The Exorcist, The Devils, The Boogens, The Shining, et al. "THAT'S THE NEXT PROJECT," spaketh our inimitable leader. "We will watch ALL horror movies produced within a designated time period whose tiles are 'The' and a noun." And that, sadly, was that.

I hoped Renee would, upon sobering up the next morning, shake her head in that I'm-so-sorry-for-everything-I-said-last-night-when-I-was-drunk kind of way and tell us to forget she had even entertained the idea, but no - if anything, she doubled down, calling all of us before 9am: "I want the 'Article, Noun' list by noon." Hell of a way to begin the new week.

The "designated time period" is 1970 to 1985, and there is no rational reason for that span of time. Renee's love of all things 1970s dictated that we include the whole decade, and one staffer who shall remain nameless threatened to quit unless we all - ALL of us - watched Michael Mann's glorious 1983 disaster The Keep, pushing us into the early 80s. Thus 1985 became the official subjective cut-off year.

As already mentioned, to qualify a movie can only be two words: "The" and a noun. Hence, integral movies such as The Satanic Rites of Dracula and The Evil Dead are automatically disqualified.

Here is the list. No doubt it's incomplete, so please email us with everything we missed:

The Devils (1971)

The Victim (1972)

The Asphyx (1972)

The Cult (1972, AKA The Manson Massacre)

The Fiend (1972, AKA Beware My Brethren)

The Other (1972)

The Baby (1973)

The Bride (1973, AKA Last House on Massacre Street)

The Exorcist (1973)

The Crazies (1973)

The Demons (1973, Jess Franco)

The Pyx (1973)

The Forgotten (1973, AKA Don't Look in the Basement)

The Antichrist (1974)

The Gardener (1974)

The Tenant (1975)

The Ghoul (1975)

The Omen (1976)

The Premonition (1976)

The Keeper (1976)

The Child (1977)

The Sentinel (1977)

The Chosen (1977, AKA Holocaust 2000)

The Uncanny (1977)

The Pack (1977)

The Possessed (1977)

The Psychic (1977, AKA Seven Notes in Black)

The Spell (1977)

The Brute (1977)

The Bees (1978)

The Swarm (1978)

The Legacy (1978)

The Evil (1978)

The Fury (1978)

The Manitou (1978)

The Shout (1978)

The Brood (1979)

The Dark (1979)

The Evictors (1979)

The Visitor (1979)

The Attic (1980)

The Unseen (1980)

The Awakening (1980)

The Shining (1980)

The Babysitter (1980)

The Boogeyman (1980)

The Fog (1980)

The Children (1980)

The Changeling (1980)

The Hearse (1980)

The Alchemist (1981/1983)

The Beyond (1981)

The Boogens (1981)

The Burning (1981)

The Fan (1981)

The Funhouse (1981)

The Hand (1981)

The Howling (1981)

The Nesting (1981)

The Pit (1981)

The Prowler (1981)

The Survivor (1981)

The Aftermath (1982)

The Appointment (1982)

The Clairvoyant (1982)

The Entity (1982)

The Incubus (1982)

The Forest (1982)

The Sender (1982)

The Slayer (1982)

The Thing (1982)

The Hunger (1983)

The Prey (1983)

The Being (1983)

The Lift (1983)

The Keep (1983)

The Initiation (1984)

The Mutilator (1984)

The Game (1984)

The Bride (1985)

The Covenant (1985)

The Strangeness (1985)

The Stuff (1985)

The thought initially was to go in chronological order, but that idea quickly fell by the wayside when staffer Van Bigola found a used copy of The Pyx on DVD at a pawn shop ("It was clearly meant to be," said he), so we'll being with The Pyx and go in whatever order we like after that. Renee wants this project all wrapped up by the end of 2022. Start your timers.

courtesy retrographik.com

Queen at 50, Part VIII

 Jazz (November 1978)

"One reason why Queen were never taken seriously by the press in the pop world was that they were not leaders of a social movement. They didn't stand for anything, except themselves. In that sense, which is normal in a person's employment, they may have even seemed a bit egocentric." - Paul Gambaccini

*****

It's worth reprinting, in full, the hysterical review of Queen's Jazz that the sanctimonious, grumpy critic Dave Marsh wrote for Rolling Stone in February of 1979:

"There's no Jazz on Queen's new record, in case fans of either were worried about the defilement of an icon. Queen hasn't the imagination to play jazz - Queen hasn't the imagination, for that matter, to play rock & roll. Jazz is just more of the same dull pastiche that's dominated all of this British supergroup's work: tight guitar/bass/drums heavy-metal cliches, light-classical pianistics, four-part harmonies that make the Four Freshman sound funky and Freddie Mercury's throat-scratching lead vocals.

"Anyway, it shouldn't be surprising that Queen calls its album 'jazz.' The guiding principle of these arrogant brats seems to be that anything Freddie & Company want, Freddie & Company get. What's most disconcerting about their arrogance is that it's so unfounded: Led Zeppelin may be as ruthless as medieval aristocrats, but at least Jimmy Page has an original electronic approach that earns his band some of its elitist notions. The only thing Queen does better than anyone else is express contempt.

"Take the LP's opening song, 'Mustapha.' It begins with a parody of a muezzin's shriek and dissolves into an approximation of Arabic music. This is part of Queen's grand design. Freddie Mercury is worldly and sophisticated, a man who knows what the muezzin sounds like. More to the point, you don't. What trips the group up, as usual, is the music. 'Mustapha' is merely a clumsy and pretentious rewrite of 'Hernando's Hideaway,' which has about as much to do with Middle Eastern culture as street-corner souvlaki.

"But it's easy to ascribe too much ambition to Queen. 'Fat Bottomed Girls' isn't sexist - it regards women not as sex objects but as objects, period (the way the band regards people in general). When Mercury chants, in 'Let Me Entertain You,' about selling his body and his willingness to use any device to thrill an audience, he isn't talking about a sacrifice for his art. He's just confessing his shamelessness, mostly because he's too much of a boor to feel stupid about it.

"Whatever its claims, Queen isn't here just to entertain. This group has come to make it clear exactly who is superior and who is inferior. Its anthem, 'We Will Rock You,' is a marching order: you will not rock us, we will rock you. Indeed, Queen may be the first truly fascist rock band. The whole thing makes me wonder why anyone would indulge these creeps and their polluting ideas."

*****

Describing his days as a young man working at Creem magazine, Dave Marsh said "I had a vision for what the magazine could do for kids who were out there being ridiculed, and beat up, and all that shit. The idea I had about Creem was, that even in rock'n'roll, it had come to pass that there was a stuffy ways of dealing with people. And I thought that part of your job as a human being was to oppose that. And if it meant that you bled a little for it, so what? Because there's some other kids who's gonna read this thing and be freed by it."

Apparently it never crossed Marsh's simplistic mind that there were many gay kids getting ridiculed and beat up for being effeminate in the 70s who loved Queen because of their effeminate lead singer. I'd bet good money many of them would tell you they were freed by the band's music. It also apparently never crossed his mind just how stuffy he was being when he trashed all the bands he hated in print and in interviews.

Why, it is logical to ask, does a man who hates so much music get paid to write about music? Because in a capitalist set-up, even miscreants and malcontents like Dave Marsh can throw their bitterness and bile at the wall and see if it sticks. That Creem and Rolling Stone flourished (for a time) printing nonsense like Marsh's Jazz review just shows you how many other bitter, close-minded people there are in the world who enjoy (or think they do) reading total junk. "Fascist rock band?" I'm not sure anything quite as idiotic has ever been written in an album review.

Fast forward 20 years and magazines like Q, Uncut, Mojo, Classic Rock, and yes, Rolling Stone, regularly lavish praise on Queen, and even Jazz. This is an approach that makes sense: find people who actually like the bands to write reviews of the records. Because there's nothing whatsoever to be gained by criticism that savages the subject, whether it's an album, book, or movie. All art is valid. Every last bit of it. Personally, I can't stand Journey or Billy Joel, but they are outstanding musicians and their music is loved by millions. I am, therefore, the last person who should be writing a review about any of their records. It's the people who dig Journey and Billy Joel who should review their records. There's plenty to be gained by hearing about why they love it, why old fans would like or dislike the new album, and why newcomers should give it a listen. Tearing down a band and their music just because you - one of eight billion motherfuckers on this planet, none of whom is more important than another - don't like it accomplishes absolutely nothing. If anything it takes us back a few steps, and it makes you sound like a whining, obnoxious crank. Negativity lowers the quality of life for everyone. I'm tired of a low quality of life. We all deserve better.

Unquestionably, Jazz is "pretentious" and Queen were frequently "arrogant." But anyone who makes that their main sticking point, in an industry brimming over with the likes of Elton John, Bob Dylan, Gene Simmons, Paul Hewson, Prince, and Mick Jagger, is taking himself way, way too seriously and ought to find another line of work.

As for the album: Dead On Time rocks, and rocks very, very hard. It is one of the all-time great Queen songs, and is so frantic and crazed you expect it to careen off the tracks at any moment. The main riff for the verses sounds like Brian May is making it up as he goes, just trying to keep up with the rhythm section. Some interesting trivia: Brian May lifted Dead On Time's out-of-hand chorus from the so-called "Fast" version of We Will Rock You, originally recorded in October of 1977 for the BBC. For years afterwards Queen opened their shows with We Will Rock You (Fast), but most fans - especially those in the U.S. who weren't able to listen to the BBC - never realized that May took Rock You (Fast)'s chorus, bumped it up a full step from E to G-flat, and reconfigured it for Dead On Time. And no jury would convict him. Dead On Time is right up there with Sheer Heart Attack and Death On Two Legs. Turn the volume way up and see what life has to offer.

Mustapha, incidentally, is hardly a clumsy and pretentious rewrite of Hernando's Hideaway. It's a fiery album-opener, waiting a full minute and nineteen seconds before the bass and low end storm into the mix (nice touch, that), making you scramble to turn the volume down so your speakers don't blow. Or, if you're smart, you just leave the volume up, speakers be damned. What's not to love? Life is short. Take advantage of the good things.

May's Dreamers Ball (minus the possessive apostrophe) is the perfect song for sitting on your porch on a summer night with a glass of bourbon, gazing at the moon with the lights out, just blending into the dark, all by yourself, existing perfectly in the moment. John Deacon meets the moment with some fine bass playing, and Freddie channels his inner lounge singer even better than he did a year earlier in My Melancholy Blues.

Mercury sings In Only Seven Days with more feeling than this short filler track probably deserves. The singer's unwavering dedication to his craft saves the song from its forgettable lyrics ("gratingly naive," according to Georg Purvis). This is what you'd call "serviceable" John Deacon.

As always, May singing one of his own songs adds another layer of texture to an album awash in different textures. Leaving Home Ain't Easy is filler, but it's elegant filler, all acoustic with no solo - one of those rare instances before the synthesizer years where the Red Special is nowhere to be heard. The guitarist sneaks in one painfully sarcastic lyric (I'm a happy man, don't it look that way?), and hearing Freddie's voice peaking over some of the backing vocals is a beautiful thing.

Roger Taylor is not quite up to his usual form on this record. The drummer, who contributed two of the most stunning songs in Queen's oeuvre on News of the World, shows up here with More of that Jazz and Fun It. More of that Jazz isn't A-list stuff, yet over the years I've grown closer to its lyrics, neatly conjuring up the kind of crippling ennui that can take you out if you're not careful, and the chorus' chord progression is freakin' awesome, you have to admit. C'mon, E to A-flat to E-flat to G? With a pick scratch in there? Even when he's not firing on all cylinders this guy's got something worth your time. Probably he played all the instruments again, as he did on News of the World. And people say Freddie had a huge ego?

Fun It is officially Queen's First Foray Into Disco. Casual Queen fans might think it was Deacon's Another One Bites the Dust, but no, it was Roger Taylor, bad-boy drummer extraordinaire, the man who wrote Modern Times Rock and Roll and Sheer Heart Attack, who first got all funky on a Queen album, ponying up three and-a-half minutes of disco-tinged, ass-shaking danciness along with some dubious lyrics ("fun's for free," etc.). There's nothing to love here, but I tell ya, there's no way to hate it, either. How can you? It's just kind of odd and harmless. For better or worse, it probably planted the seed for Another One Bites the Dust, giving the band a massive world-wide hit two years later.

I always enjoy reading what Queen fanboys have to say about Deacon's If You Can't Beat Them. Characterizing it as a "snarling rocker" and "vicious" are two faves. Don't be fooled - it is neither. It is a decent enough pop/rock song sabotaged by juvenile, insipid lyrics that I can't even believe Freddie agreed to sing. Here are the cliches Freddie sings without a hint of facetiousness: "keep your chin up," "don't let them get you down," "give as good as you get," "I'll play you at your own game," and of course, the title itself. And yet, under the "Plays" column in my Apple Music, this song registers a hefty 46. This is solely because at the 3:03 mark, with one minute and twelve seconds to go, the band roars to a halt and then blasts into an outro based on the verses that is enormous fun. Roger Taylor giddily beats his drums up, Brian May puts some phase on his Red Special, and a previously silly filler song transmogrifies before your very ears into a seriously joyous romp. This is what great bands in their prime are capable of: taking 2nd or 3rd tier songs and injecting them with something that still makes them worth your while. I can listen to those final 72 seconds all day long.

Freddie deftly borrows a chord progression from Lily of the Valley in Jealousy, an overlooked song that is the third song on side one and yet was never performed live by the band. Listen to the lead-in to the chorus ("You couldn't lose you couldn't fail, you had suspicion on my trail") and then listen to the bit in Lily of the Valley where Freddie sings "I lie and wait with open eyes, I carry on through stormy skies." Different keys, but Lily's chord pattern and melody are embedded within Jealousy's more complicated structure. And it really is gloriously complicated: what seems at first pass like a straightforward ballad about love and loss is rife with sharps, sixths, sevenths, diminished chords and unorthodox ascending patterns, while the verses change gears halfway through their arrangement each time, dropping from F to E flat. John Deacon's bass playing is typically brilliant. You know those movies or books you love that only a very small cadre of people are aware of, and you feel like you're a member of some secret, superior club? Jealousy is a song that only Queen fans know and we like it that way. In an incident reflecting the perils of the transition from the analog to the digital age, when Hollywood Records issued the entire Queen catalog on CD in 1991, the kick drum was nowhere to be heard on Jealousy. It was successfully restored in 2011 on the remastered Jazz.

The band wisely used Let Me Entertain You as a blunt instrument at the top of their setlist for a few tours in the late 1970s. It absolutely rocks, and is so wonderfully Freddie that it sums the man up - at least how he approached playing concerts - in just three minutes. Wanna know what kind of a show this shy man from Zanzibar thought bands should give their fans who paid a premium for concert tickets? He actually turns Cruella de Vil into a verb: "I'll pull you and I'll pill you, Crueladaville you, and to thrill you I'll use any device..." As part of the entertainment package he even offers "grounds for divorce." Great fucking lyric. And Brian May reliably adds his indelible signature with some frenzied leads and a good helping of feedback, like just the perfect amount of garlic in a tasty stew. Don't ever let anyone tell you this isn't one of the great Freddie songs.

Another great Freddie song is Don't Stop Me Now, the album's second single, that broke the top 10 in England but didn't do much at all in the U.S. If you're a member of the rock band Queen, perusing the American charts in January 1979, not seeing your latest single in the top 20, this is extremely disappointing. Don't Stop Me Now is one of the great party songs of all time, right up there with Highway to Hell, Celebrate and Let's Go Crazy. How many instantly-singable songs did this guy have sitting around his living room back then? And again: Brian May's lead is straight-up rollicking greatness. Are you familiar with the quote attributed to Michelangelo about how he created his masterpiece, David? "You just chip away the stone that doesn't look like David." May's genius followed a similar path between 1974 and 1980. Hearing those songs from that classic era as a kid, every guitar solo seemed so obvious - not predictable, but so obviously perfect within the structure of each song. Even at that young age I would think, of course, this amazing guitar solo, it makes perfect sense. How could these beautiful notes not be in this song? Brian just got rid of all the extraneous notes obscuring everyone's pathway to bliss, and brought out the notes that should be there - that had to be there -  for all of us to absorb. It was enough to make me believe that there really was order in the cosmos.

Jazz's first single was the double A-side Bicycle Race/Fat Bottomed Girls, generating what was then familiar animosity from so-called rock critics. "They deserve all the vitriol that may be further hurled at them," spaketh the New Musical Express, "if this is an accurate preview of the new album." But of course no vitriol whatsoever is warranted. I know Bicycle Race seems authentically ridiculous: that insane chorus bafflingly hammering home Freddie's desire to ride his bicycle, and the annoying bit in the middle with bicycle bells - dumbass stuff, yeah? But such silliness belies the only political song Freddie ever wrote, wherein he takes potshots at Jaws and Star Wars, disparages LBJ and Nixon, and then blasphemes twice, comparing God to make-believe characters like Frankenstein (we're sure he meant "Frankenstein's monster," but give the man some poetic license) and Peter Pan. Woo hoo! This is our kind of song. And thanks to the wonderful geniuses at Hollywood Records, you can listen to the backing track sans vocals on the 2011 Jazz remaster. "They deserve all the vitriol that may be further hurled at them?" What are you, fucking stupid? Listen to the rhythm section during the verses. This is not an easy song to play, and these guys are playing their asses off. It stands to reason that it was no less difficult to write. But hey, why take the time to really listen to a song and understand it when you can take all of three minutes trashing it in a childish review and get paid for it?

When the writer of a song himself is dismissive of his creation, as Brian May is with Fat Bottomed Girls ("I thought [it] was okay, but fairly banal") it is tempting to take the Dave Marsh road to derision and ridicule and total negativity and write the whole thing off. But don't listen to Brian. The guitarist is just being modest. Fat Bottomed Girls is great, guitar-driven rock and roll, and it is still a joy, all these years later, basking in the glow of its D-major dirgeyness, listening to May take his time riffing all over his drop D tuning from beginning to end. It's worth noting the definitive version of this song is on Queen On Fire: Live at the Bowl, where a robust production brings out the low ends and kick drum and is a very good thing to listen to very, very loud.

Which brings us to the one aspect of Jazz that truly is deserving of criticism. If anything actually sucks here, it's the production. Queen roped Roy Thomas Baker back into the fold for Jazz, and alas, their old-time producer, whose sharp ear gave their first four albums such depth and solid grounding, was fresh off his stint producing The Cars' debut album. Filled with loony notions of stripped-down new wave sparseness, Baker declawed Roger Taylor's big, meaty drum sound, a hallmark of every Queen album up until Jazz. The result is an album whose great songs sound only about 70% as good as they should have, leaving everything with a very un-Queen-like, tinny, trebly sheen.

Queen took a year off before recording their next studio album, filling the void with a live album. By the time The Game appeared in June 1980, the band made some major changes, bringing the curtain down on their classic era.

Queen at 49, Part VII

 News of the World (October 1977)

Here's some boring, forensic information about Queen's sixth album: it's entitled News of the World. It was recorded in 1977, between July and September, and released in October of that same year. It was the second album in a row the band produced by themselves in conjunction with engineer Mike Stone and was mostly recorded at Wessex Sound Studios in London, but also in West London's Basing Street Studios. The cover was painted by famed Sci Fi artist Frank Kelly Freas and is based on the cover he painted for the October 1953 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. There are eleven songs on the album, with all four band members writing at least two each.

Now here's all you need to know about News of the World: it is Queen's greatest album. It was better than everything that came before it, and they'd never record anything this good again. A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races are outstanding, containing some of their finest songs. Any other band releasing records that good could never record another note and retire happily, knowing they'd left their mark on popular culture.

But News of the World contain's Queen's two greatest anthems, their heaviest song, and a finalist for Greatest Queen Song of All Time, among other gems. The album's misfires - and there are three of them - do not alter the fact that six songs here easily qualify as top-tier Queen songs, some of the best work the band ever did, and among the best the 70s had to offer.

Music magazine writers never miss an opportunity to remind everyone that News of the World must always be viewed through the lens of the rise of Punk Rock. It was, of course, Queen for whom the Sex Pistols substituted on December 1, 1976, when they cursed on live television, precipitating a cultural uproar. And, as been written about innumerable times, the Sex Pistols were also at Wessex Studios in 1977, recording Never Mind the Bollocks as Queen recorded NOTW. Whether or not Queen had already decided to record something more basic on their own or felt pressured by Punk's encroachment depends on which member of the band you talk to, and what year. Roger Taylor, in 1978: "Our music has got much simpler recently, really, despite what people may think. In terms of studio use and recording techniques 'We Are the Champions' is the most simple track in the charts at the moment." Brian May, in 2017: "We'd already made a decision that... [after] A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races, we wanted to go back to basics for News of the World." Roger Taylor, around 2010: "We couldn't reinvent ourselves as a punk band, but we wanted it a little bit more simple... To be more of the times, I guess we made a more straightforward record."

Not frequently mentioned in discussions about NOTW is that two albums after dropping Roy Thomas Baker as their producer, the band proved as capable in the control room as they were playing their instruments (with an invaluable assist from Mike Stone). As well as being their best album, NOTW is Queen's best sounding album. The rhythm section in particular never sounded as glorious as it does on NOTW. Roger Taylor's kick and snare are beautifully full and earthy. John Deacon's bass tone has the perfect amount of bite. Having set aside millions of vocal and guitar overdubs for the moment, Queen sounded like a straight-up rock band.

Sleeping on the Sidewalk is one of the most forgettable songs in the band's catalog. Queen were never a blues band, and why Brian May thought attempting another blues number was a grand idea, four years after having ripped off Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee with See What a Fool I've Been, is a mystery. The Latin American vibe conjured up by John Deacon's Who Needs You should be a lot more memorable than it is. Even a nifty acoustic guitar lead (presumabley played by May, although Deacon plays acoustic guitar on the track) doesn't save the song from its undistinguished-ness. Freddie's My Melancholy Blues amusingly evokes a smoky lounge and can even be kind of cathartic if you're drinking alone at home late at night. The singer liked his album-closer enough to record it during one of the band's BBC sessions (dig Brian May's solo on the BBC take!) and keep it in the set during the band's 1977 tour. It sounds much better live.

All Dead, All Dead is a bit overwrought, and ventures perilously deep into old-time, epically-overdubbed Queen circa Queen II at the 1:55 mark, but is more than redeemed by some great lyrics in the final verse and chorus, and some beautiful Beatles-esque harmonies throughout. Written at least partially about Brian May's recently deceased cat, it is one of the biggest downers the band ever recorded.

A pretty ballad that featured in three straight Queen tours, Deacon's Spread Your Wings  benefits enormously from the fact that the bassist happened to play in the same band as Brian May and Freddie Mercury. Freddie's vocals give the verses with much-needed verve, and May, as he did on You're My Best Friend, spices things up with simple but tastefully tuneful leads. During a BBC session recorded the day NOTW was released, the band taped an even better version of the song, with Taylor doubling the tempo in the outro. It's exhilarating stuff.  Why in hell didn't they do this on the album version?

Freddie's Get Down, Make Love is ridiculous and indispensable. It's been called funk-metal and the freak-out middle section has been called psychedelic, but what astonishes - aside from Mercury's hilarious, intentionally over-the-top lyrics - is the musicianship. With all sorts of space in which to stretch out during the staccato stop-start verses (a rarity in the Queen catalog), Freddie's bandmates rise to the occasion, each adding key flavoring and tension to a song that should be way more popular than it is. Taylor's fills, alternating between snare and roto-toms, snap your head like a whip, sometimes slow and heavy, sometimes fast and cracking, always keeping you suitably off kilter (16 of them - 0:11, 0:19, 0:25, 0:32, 0:46, 0:59, 1:23, 1:30, 1:37, 1:43, 1:50, 2:03, 2:10, 3:18, 3:24, and a superb fill at 1:56). Brian May's feedback sets the mood early from 0:03 to 0:11, and some perfectly placed power chords beef up the song at 0:50, 0:55, 1:52, 1:55, 2:11, 2:14, and 3.26. He also adds precision menace at 0:12, 0:26, 0:29, 0:36, 0:46, 1:24, 1:43, 1:46, 2:04, and 3:20.

But all of this would be academic without John Deacon's inspired work. You can trace the "funk-metal" label directly to the colossal fills he delivers at 0:31, 0:41, 0:48, 1:25, 1:39, 1:49, and 3:23.

Finally, there's Freddie, in total command of this magnificent aberration, sleazy vocals to the fore ("I suck your mind - you blow my head," etc.), mirrored by some impeccable piano playing (1:40). If you ever doubted the band's genius, listen to what happens at the end of the third and final verse. Instead of clipping it off and heading into the chorus with a drum fill, as happens the previous two times, May Plays over Taylor's fill, dropping to A flat (the song is in the unorthodox key of E flat), falling almost grudgingly a step down to G flat, and then up a half-step to G for the chorus. A flat, G flat, and G, all in a row. The effect is heavy and even momentarily disorienting (did these guys just change keys? No, wait...). It doesn't get much better than this, kids.

Taylor's Fight from the Inside - the 1st of two tracks that are essentially Roger Taylor solo songs on NOTW, both of which address teen angst and disaffection - continues in the funk-metal vein, another bass-heavy, borderline sinister song. The bass and guitar are about as nasty as you'll find in Queen's recorded output (guitarist Slash cites it as a fave), and Taylor's lyrics may fairly be described as political, what with his writing off the unnamed teenage protagonist as a "money-spinner tool." The only thing the drummer did wrong in an otherwise perfect song is a misstep in the chorus. It starts going from E flat to F twice, then switching to B flat to F. He should've switched back to E flat/F one more time when he sings "you can't win with your hands tied," for maximum effect. The entire Ranting Russell staff strongly recommends that he re-record the song with this change.

Queen take their genius another order higher with Taylor's other composition on NOTW, Sheer Heart Attack. This is one of those rare moments when all the best pieces of the universe fall miraculously into place for one fleeting instance and you're reminded that life really is a gift. Begun in 1974 but not finished and recorded until 1977, it is the most punk rock song ever recorded by a non-punk rock band and is right up there with the best songs recorded by The Sex Pistols, The Damned, and The Clash. It is a pile-driving tour-de-force. It erupts in your face with a squeal from Brian May's Red Special, assaulting your skull relentlessly over its entire three minutes and 28 seconds. Taylor accentuates the assault with explosive crashes at 1:29, 1:37, 1:45, 2:08, and 2:20, the last leading into May's "solo," twenty seconds of excruciating, high-pitched NOISE (don't believe me? Listen to it all the way through on high volume. It hurts). played over a single, pounding bar chord that is mercifully squelched by Taylor's propulsive drumming, taking us back to a final, crazed chorus that ends in an instant, falling off a cliff. No outro, no fade. Just over. For the essence of teen angst, look no further than Freddie singing "I feel so inarticulate" at the end of each chorus.

"As years have passed," Chuck Eddy wrote in 2009, "News of the World has come to be best known as The Album With 'We Will Rock You' And 'We Are The Champions' On It." This is an unfair appraisal, given all the other great songs on this record, but the We Are the Champions/We Will Rock You double A-side single remains a worldwide phenomenon 43 years after it stormed the charts, with both songs played in every soccer, football, basketball, and baseball stadium in every nook and cranny of planet earth on a daily basis. Critics - especially contemporaneous critics - delighted in pedantically heaping scorn on the songs, begging the question: do music critics actually like music? We Are the Champions is one of the most deliriously tuneful things I've ever heard. It's the ultimate pop song - you can sing along to it the first time you hear it. The choruses are epic. I lose myself in every note Brian May plays on this track. Yes, the lyrics are arrogant and pretentious. (Like there's not a lot of that in rock'n'roll music.) It's Freddie Mercury, for Pete's sake. Why get worked up about the small things?

And true genius is May's work at the end of We Will Rock You. Listen closely: when the guitar feedback comes in at 1:21, it's in E. But when he hits that gargantuan first chord at the end of the final chorus, it's a C. But when the solo proper begins at 1:35, it's in A. Dr. May fools you twice. Bloody brilliant.

But not quite as brilliant as It's Late, the final Six-Minutes-Plus, Lots-Of-Parts tune of Queen's career. Built around three "scenes" in a love life fraught with peril, It's Late's lyrics are familiar territory for Queen fans. The music, however, is as electrifying as anything recorded within a radius of 20 years. With John Deacon and Roger Taylor locked in as tight as any rhythm section could ever hope to be, the song builds ruthlessly, sporting two sections where Taylor doubles the tempo, driving the song into a fever pitch, and Brian May schools every other guitarist on the planet from beginning to end. This was the guitarist's only significant foray into the hammer-ons favored by Metal guitarists, but he eschews the million-miles-an-hour solos championed by the likes of Eddie Van Halen and Yngwie Malmsteen, instead playing very deliberately, bending almost every note into position, ratcheting up the tension by making a lot of it sound almost out of tune. After two key changes Taylor doubles the tempo, and some out of left-field chord changes and a titanic drum fill take us back to one last verse and chorus. Moving back to the song's original tempo after the frenetic guitar leads is almost gleefully sadistic on the band's part (see additional kick drum beat at 4:41), but right when the song appears to be over at 5:50, another furious Taylor fill starts an explosive outro, culminating in a crazed one-chord bludgeoning that ends the song.

Two years after owning the #1 spot for nine weeks with one of the most complex, overdubbed songs ever recorded, Queen stripped down their sound and recorded their best album. NOTW was a worldwide hit, and broke them in America, the dream of every British rock band. There was no need to issue statements slagging off all the smug, self-important music critics that relentlessly castigated them in print, no need to ask them point blank, whaddya think now, creep? The last laugh was always theirs: Queen simply couldn't help putting out hit records and being wildly popular. All that was left to do was top the charts with an album that was even more offensive to the critics who hated them.