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Drive-In Discs Volume
Three
review by Gregory
Avery, 22 August 2003
Right now, let's all go out to the
drive-in.
The first motion picture I can
recall going out to see was a double-bill at a Norfolk, Virginia
drive-in. The main feature was A Hard Day's Night. My sister
was one of the original Beatlemaniacs -- she had all the L.P.'s,
45's, and a pair of go-go boots, and we watched the band's first
television appearance on the "Ed Sullivan Show" -- so we
simply HAD to go. They showed the Beatles' film last; the second
feature, which was shown first, was what I thought for years to have
been The Fall of the Roman Empire. My parents kept joking
that the movie should have been called My Son, the Emperor,
which could, in a stretch, pretty much fit as a description of the
plot for the Samuel Bronston epic. All that I could remember was
that it was in color, had Romanesque columns in it, and the people
who looked like they could be ancient Romans. It wasn't until the
1990s that I found out what I thought had been The Fall of the
Roman Empire was actually My Son, the Hero, a French and
Italian-made sword-and-sandal drama which had been somewhat
comically -- and possibly deliberately so -- dubbed into English.
Since we moved around a lot when I
was a kid (my father being an active Naval officer), being inside a
car was a very familiar experience. Why not watch a movie there? You
drive up to the ticket booth, pay your price, and then made a
contained dash to park in a good spot where you can see the screen.
You also hope to get a good speaker, if the drive-in is not
broadcasting the sound on an airwave band that you can pick up on
your car radio. Then, especially if it's summer, you wait for that
precipitous moment when the sun will have gone down just enough so
that it's dark enough to start watching the show....
Gedunks in hand, you launch into
the first feature. If the kids get to be too much, you can send them
on down to play on the swing-sets in front of the screen, where they
hopefully won't get eaten-up by bugs. When the first feature ends,
you need to reload on supplies. Ah, watery Coke, or how 'bout a
pizza? Tim Hansen slept through a showing of Humanoids from the
Deep, but, before the second feature, Rabid, began, we
decided to be adventurous and bought a pizza at the concession
stand. I have never tasted anything like it, before or since. Some
of the oddest intermission trailers I've seen were at a drive-in in
Idaho Falls -- they had been made a good twenty years prior, but
looked just like new, including the one where a couple of parents
with two offspring appeared, with their heads punched through white,
canvas-like paper, to exhort us to
buy some ice cream on a stick: four disembodied heads, with a
disembodied hand holding ice cream. It was like something you'd see
on L.S.D. But, good grief, who's complaining? Especially if you're
seeing the movie in a two-seat import convertible with the top down.
By the time the second feature has started, you're having a true and
unique experience in moviegoing under a canopy of stars....
The new "Drive-In Disc"
is the third in a series, put together by the National Film Museum
and Elite Entertainment, that uses DVD technology to recreate the
experience of seeing a drive-in double feature. (And there are two
audio tracks to choose from, the first with regular sound, the
second done in "Distorto", which enables you to hear the
movie just as it would sound coming out of an old-style drive-in
speaker which you hung on your car window.) The two feature films on
the DVD are accompanied by vintage advertisements, trailers
announcing everything from holiday fireworks displays to special
movie passes, and short subjects. That the two feature films on the
disc are scare pictures is not unusual. Scare films seem to be
particularly conducive to the drive-in experience, whether it's Baron
Blood or the sublime The Abominable Dr. Phibes, or The
Giant Spider Invasion, where, in one scene, a group of people
are chased down a street by a Volkswagen done over to look like a
giant spider. The fondness of seeing these films at southern Oregon
drive-ins stands in contrast to when I was attending school in Utah,
where drive-ins were places where you snuck off to see pictures like
Maniac, William Lustig and Joe Spinell's sensitive art film,
on a double-bill with The Toolbox Murders.
Pulling down the blinds and turning
off the lights (what? you're going to see a drive-in program, even
if it's on DVD, with the lights ON?), one settles in and, after a
few advertisements, including one for Toddy, a canned chocolate
malted drink good hot or cold (?!), and a wicky-wacky preview
trailer for Blood Creature (a panther-man movie made in the
Philippines and originally titled "Terror is a Man"), we
see the first of two wonderful "Gumby" cartoons (another
will precede the second feature). I haven't seen these for years --
and years and years -- and I'd forgotten the simple charm and appeal
that Art Clokey's clay and stop-motion animation work had. (Also,
the deep sense of benevolence behind the work.) The first feature, I
Bury the Living (1958), I'm already familiar with, but it is
still one of the most unusually creepy films I've ever seen. Richard
Boone, in a very good performance, plays a man who reluctantly
agrees to act as volunteer chairman of the committee that oversees
the local cemetery. A map in the cemetery caretaker's office
displays white pins, for those plots not yet occupied, and black
pins, for those that are. Boone's character accidentally puts in a
pair of black pins instead of white ones, and the persons for whom
the cemetery plots were intended suddenly drop dead. He then becomes
increasingly rattled as he tries to determine whether he has some
sort of heretofore unknown power over life and death. Plus, what
would happen if you took some of the black pins already in the map
out and replaced them with white pins.... Along with Boone's
performance, the picture benefits greatly from having visuals
created by the great montage artist Slavko Vorkapich, who devised
subtly sinister imagery to accompany the sometimes terrifying music
score by Gerald Fried.
It's intermission -- phew! time to
crawl out from under your seat and return to some state of normalcy
-- and, of course, gedunks are low. Should I get some of that drink
announced in the advert for Dutch Treete, ANOTHER canned chocolate
beverage that's good served hot or cold? (How do you heat it up? Put
it in the stove?) Huston's Hallucinations is coming to town, in
which, on-stage, after showing us a "girl without a
middle" and the "weird and unusual burning of a
she-devil" ("Actual MURDER!" screams an on-screen
caption), we'll get to see, ooh, la, la,
"the talked about girl in the Topless Swimsuit!"
(Presumably, Rudi Gernreich's design creation which, in 1964, used
the "body itself" as "an integral part of a suited
design".) There's a trailer that warns us about the perils of
Pay T.V. -- "Pay T.V. and cable T.V. companies are seeking the
right to charge you for the very programs you now get free", at
a time when you could still get 99.9% of your television programming
using a rooftop antennae; then a preview trailer for Creature
from the Haunted Sea -- a picture made, for about $1.98, by
Roger Corman at the same time that he made The Little Shop of
Horrors. Little Shop..., even with all its budgetary
restrictions, was one of those instances where everything clicked
and it turned out to be one of the best black comedies ever made.
"Creature...", if I recall correctly, was like sitting in
cement while it hardened. But the preview trailer looks great.
The second feature, the 1960 film The
Hand, I am not previously familiar with. (I did see Oliver
Stone's 1981 film The Hand, with Michael Caine, and lived to
tell the tale. As someone noted at the time, the disembodied hand in
that film crawled all over the place but never did anything
"fun", i.e. slither up women's legs or tap sneakily on car
windows, but, then again, there was this whole
reality-versus-fantasy thing going on in Stone's film, which proved
dizzying.) The 1960 The Hand starts out showing three British
Army men who are taken prisoner by the Japanese at the end of World
War Two, and are tortured by having their hands cut off. However,
not content to make a movie about what happens to the three men when
the story jumps ahead fourteen years to "present-day"
London, the filmmakers throw in a murder, an amputation, a suicide,
another murder, a mysterious man who goes by the name of
"Roberts", an ambush, a severed hand in a box -- and then
doesn't explain any of it. (And take my word for it: I looked at
this picture twice.) Not a particularly unpleasant experience in
this instance, but it amounts to a bit more than Raymond Chandler
failing to explain who killed the chauffeur in The Big Sleep.
And people in this movie, or, rather, the police, smoke: a lot. When
they're not fumbling with unlit cigarettes or fingering lit ones,
they're lighting each other up. It's so pervasive that, after a
while, I was wondering if there was some sort of coded behavior
going on, like the business with the walking stick in Gilda.
(The law is represented by actors Ronald Leigh-Hunt, who's first
line in the movie is, "Blast everybody and everything!",
and Ray Cooney, who has the fresh-faced appeal of youth and also
co-wrote the screenplay.) And there's an attempted kidnapping near
the end of the film: "Mummy? The telly's gone wrong,
again!" says a little imp who runs into a room and is then
snatched up by a malefactor wielding a gun, and who then goes out a
back door with the hostage. Not for long: the tyke comes right back,
saying, "Mummy? I got away!" (See? Movie-making is
simple.)
At this point, it's time for all
good chickens to go home and roost. We are reminded to take the
sound speaker out of our car window, or at least to turn the speaker
in on the way out if we yank it loose. This has never happened to me
-- the only problem I ever encountered was parking next to a speaker
that turned out to be useless, but was, worse, at a good spot to
park in.
In southern Oregon, the Valley was
the first one to go, then the Lithia, the land redeveloped so that
it is impossible to determine where either drive-in once stood. The
Starlite was to have been reopened, but while the sign still stands,
the grounds are untended and gradually being reclaimed by nature. So
I was pleased to learn, from the information included with the new
"Drive-In Disc", about the community effort to
successfully re-open Hull's Drive-In theater, which was on the verge
of closing permanently after some fifty years of operation. The
drive-in is now community-owned and run on a non-profit basis, and
is located outside of Lexington, Virginia, 165 miles northwest of
Norfolk.
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