Night Tide

A curious “film maudit,” Curtis Harrington’s 1961 “Night Tide” is a bargain basement remake of Val Lewton’s “Cat People”. Harrington studied Lewton’s work closely and was an admirer of Josef von Sternberg and these influences impart a lyrical intensity to his film. Dennis Hopper plays a young U. S. navy sailor, Johnny, stationed in San Pedro. One night, the sailor wanders into a jazz club, mingles with a group of late fifties-style beatniks, and meets a mysterious woman named Mora. Mora is the prototypical ”dark woman” of American lit-crit studies -- a sinister foreigner from beyond the sea who lures men to their deaths. Mora believes that she is a mermaid and plays that role in a seaside amusement park. She lounges in a sarcophagus-shaped aquarium wearing a fish tail over her thighs, hips and feet and seems half asleep under a rippling sheet of water. The attraction is part of a freak show and Mora’s tank sits on a pedestal in a windowless vault decorated like a Cretan tomb and vertiginous with light reflecting on the water stirring in her aquarium. A drunken British sea-captain serves as her protector, a sinister father-figure, who also acts as a carnival barker. The “light woman,” a perky blonde, warns Johnny that Mora is some kind of insane siren and that she has lured her last two boyfriends to watery graves. And Johnny begins to suspect that Mora may, in fact, really be a mermaid tempting him to follow her into the ocean’s fatal depths. The movie is a strange mixture of overtly homosexual imagery and themes and a peculiarly poetic sort of horror film. Harrington was openly gay and the scenes involving Dennis Hopper prowling the water-front in specially tailored, skin-tight white trousers with nautical cap and shirt have a homosexual Tom of Finland kind of charge -- the scenes, particularly the opening shot, a moody high-contrast image of Hopper brooding over the boardwalk, look like something from Fassbinder’s adaptation of Genet’s “Querelle.” Other sequences in the film take place in massage parlor where a beefy seafarer-type kneads Hopper’s pale, skinny shoulders, imagery that would not be out of place in one of Guy Maddin’s delirious shorts -- all steam and Pier-one wicker, a bit like the ambience of “Sissy Boy Slap Party." And there is a suspense scene shot under the Santa Monica pier, a notorious ”cruising” location -- the forest of columnar timbers supporting the boardwalk has a strange archaic quality and the inky waves under the pier pounding against the structure imparts a nightmare quality to the imagery. The film’s locations are indelible: seedy waterfront alleyways, the subterranean jazz club where a group of bored decadents are gathered, Mora’s apartment incongruously perched above a merry-go-round in a huge white-washed shed on the amusement pier, the rooms white-washed and bare mostly, although decorated here and there with a few shells, a star-fish, and a Greek icon of the Virgin Mary. Mora’s protector lives in a similarly bizarre abode, a gothic cloister occupying a stony ledge above a filthy looking industrial lagoon. (The sea captain is brother to Michel Simon’s barge pilot in “L’Atalanta” and, like that character, keeps a pickled hand in a jar.) Harrington populates the picture with grotesques, various members of the occult underground in Beverly Hills revolving around Kenneth Anger, the author of “Hollywood Babylon” and himself an important avant-garde (and gay) filmmaker. Mora is summoned to the deep by Cameron, the so-called “Wormwood Star,” a famous priestess of the Ordo Templi Orientalis in Los Angeles (she cavorts in a number of Anger’s hallucinatory films) and her bony, angular face is a haunting and sinister presence in the film. An extraneous Tarot-reading scene gives an impressive forum to another of Harrington’s character actors, a scarecrow-like female chiromancer. Harrington made the movie for $50,000 and because it was shot with a non-union cast and crew, the picture received only a limited commercial release. But it was one of Henri Langlois’ favorite films and, preserved in the Paris Cinematheque, has survived to be seen today. The picture is uneven. Hopper mumbles his way through his scenes and seems genuinely disoriented throughout much of the picture. Mora is stiff, although her somewhat somnambulant performance adds to the film’s eerie effect. Harrington, a lifelong admirer of Edgar Allen Poe, puts in a gratuitous reference to “Annabel Lee” that doesn’t really fit in with anything in the movie, although that epigraph can be interpreted as a homage to Lewton, who freighted his films with similarly literary references. It’s not a great film by any means and rather languidly paced, but its amazing that a picture of this sort -- the bastard child of Hollywood and the underground cinema -- even exists.