Guns, Giants and Bank Robberies

I'm afraid that I wasn't able to follow-up my Easter bank holiday weekend film-watching orgy this bank holiday weekend.  For one thing, I had to endure a bout of health problems last week that left me too exhausted to do much but sleep in the run-up to the weekend.  I won't go into details but, at the time, it was all pretty traumatic.  Then I spent a chunk of Sunday putting together another podcast for the Overnightscape Underground, while today the car needed cleaning, (its usual parking place is close to a tree, so, thanks to my reluctance to clean it during the winter, it had gone green with mould on one side and had moss growing on the window rubbers).  I did, however, manage to catch up with a couple of low budget films I've been meaning to watch for a while, namely Giant From the Unknown (1958) and The Lady in Red (1979)  The former is an independently produced B monster movie that does its best to look like a Universal B-horror of the same period.  Indeed, it has a Universal connection in that the title monster's make-up was created by Jack Pierce, who had headed up the studio's make-up department and created the make-ups for Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, the Mummy and the Wolfman, amongst others, (he was sacked in 1946 and replaced by Bud Westmore, subsequently plying his trade at a variety of low budget studios).  

The monster, though, is decidedly underwhelming - a very large Spanish Conquistador who has been in suspended animation for centuries, but has been revived by a lightning strike.  The script, unfortunately, is hugely confused - was the 'giant' revived during the mid movie lightening storm, in which case who or what was mutilating cattle and killing people prior to this, or was he revived earlier, in which case why was he molesting cattle? - with it taking and age for the monster to appear.  Even when he does appear, he's a pretty dull monster, engaging in a few unmotivated killings before being knocked off of a bridge into a river.  With a script padded out with far too much talk, Giant From the Unknown drags its way through a seventy seven minute running time that feels far longer. The Lady in Red, produced by Roger Corman's New World Pictures, by contrast, packs a lot of incident and characters into its ninety three minutes.  Perhaps too much, as characters and incidents flash past, sometimes without registering properly.  Thankfully nothing to do with the bad Chris de Burgh song, (what am I saying, the bad Chris de Burgh song?  All of his songs are bad), The Lady in Red purports to tell the story of the 'Woman in Red' who betrayed bank robber John Dillinger to the authorities, the red dress she wore when accompanying him to a cinema allowing FBI agents to identify and kill him. Except that here the eponymous lady isn't the historical Ana Cumpanas, (a Romanian prostitute and madam), but instead the fictional Polly Franklin, a poor farmer's daughter, who escapes her violent father and engages in a series of adventures that lead her to working in Cumpanas' brothel, unwittingly marking Dillinger for death and eventually bank robbery in her own right.  Here, Cumpanas, (played by Louise Fletcher and called by her alias Ana Sage), tricks Franklin (who is in love with Dillinger, but doesn't know his true identity), into wearing the red dress, so as to avoid being herself identified as Dillinger's betrayer, fearing reprisals from the underworld.

Despite being made on a very tight budget, The Lady in Red boasts excellent production values, with plenty of convincing period detail and some very well staged action sequences.  The film, (scripted by John Sayles), is, in an essence, a picaresque tale, chronicling Franklin's journey from naive country girl to criminal gang leader, via series of adventures that almost constitute a compendium of exploitation themes as she variously ends up in women's prison, working as a prostitute, a gangster's moll and even, early on, involved in the battle between organised labour and organised crime.  It's very entertainingly directed by Lewis Teague and includes James Horner's first credited film score.  Sadly, it didn't fare too well at the box office, perhaps because it was marketed as a Dillinger film, despite the fact that he constitutes only a relatively small part of the plot, (his character not appearing until nearly two thirds into the film).  I must admit that my interest in the film was partly personal, in that the title role was played by Pamela Sue Martin.  Just prior to making the film, she had starred as Nancy Drew in the Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries.  I cannot deny that twelve or thirteen year old me had something of a crush on her as a result of seeing her in the series, (I was very disappointed when she was replaced by another actress part way through the second series, after the character was relegated from having her own alternating episodes to being a secondary character in the Hardy Boys episodes).  While she was subsequently in soap opera Dynasty, (she was eventually replaced in that as well, I recall), I was always intrigued by this, one of her few film leading roles.  I have to say that, for those of us who remember her as Nancy Drew, her appearance in The Lady in Red is mildly startling, as she has a couple of nude scenes as well as sex scene, (to be fair, overall, she gives a very effective performance in the lead role).  I'm glad that I didn't see this when it was released as I'm sure that the sight of the object of one of my crushes with her knockers out would have been too much for my adolescent libido...