Roger Corman and X – The Man with X-Ray Eyes
“Nudity sells.” – Roger Corman
Always make the monster bigger than your leading lady – Roger Corman
Ad copy for Candy Stripe Nurses (New World Films - 1974) : “They’ll give you fast-fast-fast relief! Playing doctor was never like this! Keep abreast of the medical world with the Candy Stripe Nurses”
Plato thought that the eyes worked by extromission –that is, the eyes emitted particles that collided with objects and, then, returned as messengers to report to the brain on their adventures. Aristotle thought that vision worked on the basis of intromission; objects sprayed light-bearing particles from their surfaces some of which were collected in the interior of the eye and, then, analyzed by the brain. Because God is light, the eye is the part of human body closest to the divine.
Wilhelm Roentgen invented an early version of the x-ray machine. In 1895, Roentgen made a fifteen minute exposure of his wife, Anna Bertha’s left hand. (The image exists today showing bones underlying Anna Bertha’s left hand on which her wedding ring is clearly visible.) Anna Bertha was horrified at the picture, and upon first seeing it, cried out “I have seen my own death.” She is said to have never entered her husband’s laboratory again.
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Corman’s advice to young film-makers: Prioritize your shots; rehearse while the crew is lighting the set; chase the sun; use foreground objects to enliven a dialogue scene; bring in movement to stimulate the eyes; wear comfortable shoes and sit down whenever you can.
Corman’s directions to a new director, Christian Blackwell who made Night call Nurses (1972): “Get frontal nudity f rom the waist up, total nudity from behind, no pubic hair – now, get to work!”
Corman’s requirements as to scriptwriting: “There should be nudity every 15 pages, but it can be partial, a bare shoulder, buttocks, a boob... the leading lady has to strip or the audience will feel cheated.”
Corman disputed the notion that he made “B” movies. The characterization of a movie as a “B” picture arose in the silent era when Adolf Zukor, the founder of Famous Players Studio (est. 1912) created a three tier production system: “Class A” movies featured stage stars and professionally built sets and were made with “artistic” qualities; “Class B” movies were made with established screen actors; “Class C” movies were cheaply and quickly made without experienced or well-known actors. Bu the mid-thirties, this hierarchy had collapsed into “A” and “B” movies. B movies were made for the bottom of a double feature. Ordinarily, a double feature would be comprised of a prestige picture made with a big star or stars and “B movie” that was much more cheaply produced with actors who were either not well known or declining with respect to their star power. Corman began making movies in the fifties when the studios were no longer releasing prestige pictures as part of a double feature. Therefore, Corman argues that “(he) never made a B picture in his life.” His films were essentially short features, made quickly and with low budgets, but featuring actors who were reasonably well-known in the industry – for instance, people like Vincent Price. Corman’s pictures were largely made for consumption at drive-in movie theaters, a kind of screening ubiquitous in the fifties, sixties, and seventies. (Austin had a drive-in movie theater that showed pictures outdoors until the mid-eighties.) The most famous drive-in movie theater in Minneapolis was the France Avenue screen at 494 and France, a theater that persisted from June 1966 until 1982 when it was closed and, then, demolished in 1986. The theater had spaces for 1700 cars.) Around 1959, my father drove from Asbury Park, New Jersey to Philadelphia to pick up a friend at the bus station. (This was Alan Bowman, a DJ at a rural radio station in central Nebraska). For some reason, I traveled with my father in our old Rambler dressed in my pajamas. Off the Jersey State Turnpike, I recall seeing a huge screen on which a movie was being projected. On the screen, a brown and gold city was collapsing into rubble – my father said that the movie was called The Last Days of Pompeii. It was odd to see the calamity writ in enormous images against the night sky proceeding in complete silence. The Internet identifies this picture as released in 1959, an Italian sword and sandal epic starring Steve Reeves.) Producers of B movies were called “Keepers of the B’s” or “B-Keepers.”
Corman was born in 1926 in Detroit, the son of an engineer who designed roads, bridges, and dams. People who knew him said that Corman had the analytical mind-set of an engineer. He loved tinkering and economizing. Efficiency and thrift were his bywords. (As a boy, he built model airplanes with balsam wood, equipped them with motors, and, under radio-control, flew them. This hobby stood him in good stead when he made Von Richthofen and Brown (1971), a World War One flying aces movie shot largely in Ireland and employing many shots using model airplanes.)
Corman’s engineering sensibility is evident in the way that he would make one movie and, then, in quick succession build another picture from the outtakes and footage left on the cutting room floor from the production of the first film. (This was the modus operandi that resulted in the well-regarded twin Westerns Ride the Whirlwind and The Shooting, both directed by Monte Hellman and released in 1966). In some instances, Corman economized by using the same sets in several successive movies: he did this with Bucket of Blood (1959) and Little Shop of Horrors (1960) – in the latter film, Corman used both the sets in the 1959 picture and two-days free studio shooting at the old Chaplin Studios before it was torn down. (Little Shop of Horrors was shot in two days; in the early sixties, Corman didn’t take pains to preserve his work – the original negative of the movie was thought to be lost, but bootleg versions circulated, some of them shown on TV without recompense to Corman. When Allen Mencken scored his musical version of the picture for Broadway, Corman had to find the negative. His brother located it, gathering dust on a shelf in the recording studio where the post-production dub had been made – it was labeled The Passionate People Eaters.) In some cases, Corman would acquire a foreign film for next-to-nothing, for instance, a badly made and cheap Russian science fiction picture that he had re-cut, re-dubbed, and fitted-out with monster footage – the result was Battle Beyond the Sun (1963), edited and revised by an eager-beaver UCLA film-school graduate, Francis Ford Coppola. This worked so well that Corman repeated the trick in Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968) in which he re-cut another Soviet sci-fi movie (1962's Planeta Bur), hiring Peter Bogdanovich to shoot some additional skin-flick scenes with Mamie van Doren playing a naked mermaid. Sometimes, Corman would simply re-make a prestige picture, but with an exploitation angle – his 1974 sword and sandal movie The Arena is an all-female gladiator rip-off of Spartacus. If a picture featured lots of nudity, Corman’s staff would try to sell centerfold images of the leading ladies to Playboy, thereby establishing buzz for the movie and garnering free publicity (as well as a fee for the publication of proprietary photographs.)
Corman’s second to last directorial effort was Gas-s-s-s! Or it became necessary to destroy the World to save it. In this horror-comedy, an airborne toxin kills everyone older than 25. The youth are left to run a world in which all elders, politicians, leaders, and trusted religious figures have been eliminated. The picture featured Talia Shire, Bud Cort and Ben Vereen; the climax of the movie was shot at Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico. Prior to making Gas-s-s-s! (released in 1970), Corman had directed more than sixty pictures, making movies at a rate of five or six per year. After 1970, with one exception, Corman limited his involvement in the film industry to producing and distributing films directed by others.
Corman returned to directing for Frankenstein Unbound! released in 1990. This was his last directorial effort. He is credited with producing several hundred pictures as well as many cable TV series and shows. Beginning with Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers in 1992, his company also distributed many European art-house films, including Truffaut’s Story of Adele H, Fellini’s Amarcord, Kurosawa’s Dersu Urzala and Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo. For Amarcord, Corman cut a trailer that was “all boobs and buns”; he said “it may be Fellini but we’re still selling sex and violence.” When Fellini saw the trailer he said it was better than the way the movie had been marketed in Italy and Europe because of its “flat-out vulgarity.”
Corman was famously well-spoken and had courtly manners. He paid next-to-nothing. Corman’s notion was that young people would work for peanuts to have an opportunity to break into the movie industry. He hired young women to work as his personal assistants. The pay was awful and the job description included anything, more or less, Corman needed to get done. On the other hand, young women who worked for him, started by answering the phone, buying doughnuts and brewing coffee, but by the second week were reading scripts and scouting locations. Although no one could stand working for him for very long – he was demanding and unpredictable – no one ever regretted their first employment with him either.
Corman alumni who had their first jobs with him include: Peter Bogdanovich, James Cameron, David Carradine, Francis Coppola, Joe Dante, Jonathon Demme, Bruce Dern, Ron Howard, Peter Fonda, Carl Franklin, Pam Grier, Monte Hellman, Dennis Hopper, the cameraman Janusz Kaminski (D.P. on Schindler’s List), Jack Nicholson, Sylvester Stallone, John Sayles, and Martin Scorsese. Scorsese shot Box Car Bertha with Shelley Winters on Corman’s payroll. Corman recognized Scorsese’s talent and told him: “Make this movie right and you’ll never have to work for me again.”
Corman liked marketing gimmicks. When he released Piranha in 1978 (directed by John Sayles), his advertising people suggested that local theaters throw dead piranhas (that could be acquired through the studio) on the banks of waterways in the community in an attempt to stir-up panic. “Boy Scouts and local law enforcement can be enlisted in the ad campaign as they investigate the reports of piranhas in their rivers and lakes.” Corman coordinated film publicity with centerfold pictures of his leading ladies in Playboy and Hustler. One of Corman’s assistants remembered fielding calls from Playboy when Corman was producing Bloody Mama with Angie Dickinson. The Playboy flack wanted to know if the leading lady would take off her clothes for magazine. The assistant said that the woman with the best figure on the set was Angie Dickinson and she wouldn’t do the gig, but, maybe, one of the supporting actresses could be persuaded to appear.
Corman thought of himself as the “sody-pop kid”, a reference to George Stevens’ Shane.
Corman married one of his assistants, Julie Halloran in December 1970. At the wedding party, Corman, who had economized on booze, ran out of champagne. Not to worry: Jack Nicholson was sent out to buy another couple cases of the bubbly.
Corman received recognition to his contributions to cinema late in his life. In 1996, he as awarded the Academy’s Governor’s Award for Achievement. But this honor was fraught with controversy. Originally, Elia Kazan had been selected for the award, but Hollywood bears grudges and Kazan had “named names” to HUAC in the fifties and a number of prominent players threatened to boycott the awards ceremony if the prize was given to him. As a compromise, and, I think, a sort of joke, the Governor’s award, therefore, was a given to the somewhat disreputable Corman. Corman received an honorary Oscar in November 2009. At the banquet, Corman alumni were much in evidence. Quentin Tarantino, a big fan, showed a reel of Corman’s greatest hits, including the dance scene from X-The Man with X-ray Eyes
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Corman was a great recycler of props, sets, and used actors. Peter Lorre, Basil Rathbone, and Boris Karloff all made their last pictures with Corman. (Boris Karloff’s performance in Peter Bogdanovich’s 1968 Targets, produced by Corman, is one of his greatest and the movie, which seems mostly improvised, is a classic. Corman resolved a contract dispute with Karloff arising from his appearance (with Peter Lorre) in his picture The Raven (1963) by agreeing to pay the actor for a two-day shoot that Bogdanovich parleyed into the well-reviewed Targets – a mass murderer is stalking a drive-in movie theater and Karloff, who appears in a cheesy movie on the big screen, saves the day by hunting down the sniper who is shooting audience members in their parked cars.) Movie stars got their first big break on Corman films – for instance, Peter Fonda, Sylvester Stallone, and, of course, Jack Nicholson among many others; conversely, washed-up actors ended their careers in Corman movies as well.
Corman claimed to have produced over 100 movies and never lost a dime. In fact, this was the title of his autobiography. The exception to this string of successes was Corman’s pet project The Intruder made in 1962. The Intruder starred William Shatner and was a story “torn from today’s headlines” – the picture involved the desegregation of an Arkansas public school in the face of violent racism. Corman made the movie on location in Sikeston, Missouri and the film’s production was vexed by threats and vandalism committed by local Klansmen. When the movie, an uncompromising look at White supremacy, was released it was widely regarded as an important and effectively made picture with a social conscience. (Corman was a life-long liberal Democrat.) Corman made the movie for United Artists but that company got cold feet and withdrew the picture from distribution. Although slated for screening at the Cannes Film Festival, the distributor also withdrew the movie from that competition. No one saw the picture, a film Corman regarded with pride as one of his best, and the movie lost money. Corman was dismayed by the experience, began psycho-therapy (which he continued for the rest of his life) and vowed that he wouldn’t get trapped making a “message” picture ever again. On the heels of this debacle, Corman turned back to Poe and exploitation movies such as X - The Man with X-Ray Eyes.
Corman hired Ray Milland to appear in X: the Man with X-ray Eyes. Milland was past his prime in 1963. He had won an Oscar for his performance as an alcoholic in Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend (1945). Milland had been a big star: he worked for Fritz Lang in Ministry of Fear (1944) and Alfred Hitchcock in Dial M for Murder (1954). (Hollywood is fickle – it’s interesting to consider that Milland appearing in a drive-in exploitation film directed by Roger Corman had been acting for Hitchcock alongside Grace Kelly in a prestige production made a mere nine years earlier). As a handsome leading man, Milland had appeared as a romantic lead opposite Dorothy Lamour, Marlene Dietrich, Grace Kelly (with whom he reputedly had an affair) and many other famous actresses. He also appeared as the protagonist in one of the most well-regarded film noirs, The Big Clock (1948). After working in television for a few years, Milland retired to the French Riviera. Retirement didn’t suit him and he returned to the screen courtesy of Corman casting him in one of his Poe films, The Premature Burial (1962) and, then, as Dr. Xaver in X: The Man with X-Ray Eyes (1963). Milland continued to act on television (Death Valley Days) and horror and action movies, including the notorious Blaxploitation film The Thing with Two Heads (1972), as a White racist sharing a torso with Rosey Grier. He died in 1986.
Corman made X - The Man with X-Ray Eyes for $300,000. The picture was shot in three weeks. Corman had dispatched a film-crew to France to capture location shots for a racing movie set at the Grand Prix. The apprentice sound man on that picture was a recent UCLA graduate, Francis Ford Coppola. Corman thought Coppola had promise and, after the shoot on the Riviera wrapped, he gave the kid a budget of $22,000 and told him to go to Ireland to make an ax-murderer picture on a three-day schedule. The result was Dementia 13. The picture was no good, but Corman used it to fill-out the lower-half of a double bill with X - The Man with the X-Ray Eyes.
Corman’s X - The Man with X-Ray Eyes consists of six sections. The first part of the movie comprises about one-third of its length – in this section, we are introduced to Dr. Xavier and his experiments with enhancing vision. After the rhesus monkey dies from the lethal pressure of what it has seen, Dr. Xavier applies his serum to his own eyes so that he can peer through human bodies. In this part of the film, X uses his x-ray vision in service of medicine. But his efforts result in the accidental death of his colleague and X becomes a fugitive from justice. The succeeding scenes in the movie are much shorter and accelerate rapidly to the film’s grim ending. The picture traces Dr. Xavier’s decline from using his gifts in service to medicine, to side-show fortune-telling, quack healing, and crime. The stations of the X’s cross, as it were, are the amusement park on the pier (a sideshow attraction), a desolate urban street with it uncanny entirely chalk-grey structures where X’s skills are used as part of a specious healing scheme, thence, as an instrument of theft in Las Vegas and, then, a car chase that leads X to the final and sixth act, the film’s ending at the religious tent-revival. In terms of locations, the six episodes can be defined as (1) hospital; (2) amusement park on pier; (3) a nondescript store-front; (4) Las Vegas; (5) desert highways; and (6) and the tent revival or tent meeting.
Corman designs the film to mirror the picture’s genre. X is constructed so that it can be marketed as a movie exploiting nudity – after all, the film’s premise is that it’s hero can see through people’s garments, an aspect of Dr. Xavier’s enhanced vision that is, indeed, aggressively developed in the first (hospital) section in which the protagonist attends a party and sees the dancers gyrating around him without their clothing. Xavier wants to see visions that are forbidden to ordinary sight – the 7/10ths of the electromagnetic spectrum to which our eyes are insensitive. Corman’s audience also wants to see things that are ordinarily off-limits – in this case, naked women and men. Accordingly, there are strong thematic connections between X’s project and the desires of the audience to also see things exposed that are ordinarily concealed. After all, the making of an exploitation film is not all that different from what Dr. Xavier attempts. And, in fact, the two enterprises, seeing into the forbidden spectrum, and looking at sex, nudity, and violence as embodied in a film of this kind, are conceptually similar enterprises. Indeed, Corman highlights the commercial aspects of making movies by the scenes in which Dr. Xavier’s surrogates seek funding from the rather shadowy foundation represented by the beautiful, blonde female physician who acts on behalf of the non-profit controlling the purse-strings for the mad scientist’s experiments. The film’s curious emphasis, at least initially, on finances mirrors Corman’s interests in making the best movie possible with the least amount of money. If the money runs out, the show ends.
Corman’s exploitation films are usually something of a bait and switch or a tease. These movies, at least as they existed in the sixties, were akin to the side-show attractions featured in the film’s second episode on the amusement pier: more is suggested than is shown and the audience never gets to fully enjoy the spectacle that the movie’s premise (and advertising) promise. This is clearly the case with X. We buy our ticket in the hope of viewing naked women. But, instead, of nude bodies, the film’s actual subject is different – X is primarily about death. Dr. Xavier sees through skin and flesh to visualize the bone. (The sordid carnival barker played by Don Rickles, for instance, is visualized as a talking skull.) The movie doesn’t so much expose tits and ass as it reminds us of our mortality – underneath our plump, pink flesh, we are all skeletons.
Corman details a variety of means of seeing in X. Here is a partial listing of ways that we can use our eyes as shown in the film: we can use our eyes to gratify sexual desire (voyeurism); our eyes can be deployed as scientific instruments in search of the objective truth (x-rays); we can see in order to discover other’s secrets (“Mentallo”) or steal (breaking the bank at Vegas); our eyes may be tools to judge others – a look can condemn. Seeing can be visionary: Dr. Xavier sees a monstrous eyeball in the glowing center of the universe. This ocular god may be Emerson’s transcendent eyeball (“All mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing...I am a particle of God.”) The transparent eyeball at the center of the universe, an image that mirrors the disembodied eye in the eerily long first shot, is, also, a camera. Corman’s mad scientist imagines God as a camera.
Corman’s X demonstrates a paradox. The more Dr. Xavier’s vision is strengthened and enhanced, the less he is able to see. This is dramatized in the scene in which Xavier flees in his car over desert highways. Xavier can see everything but his pitch-black eyes are, also, damaged to the extent that he can’t drive. If you can see everything, you may see nothing that all. This paradox, that too much seeing equals blindness, is visually expressed in the deterioration of Dr. Xavier’s eyes into wet, dark cavities in his face. The eye is light’s receptor and, for Medieval philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas, God is light, claritas, and splendor; the eyes, therefore, partake of this light and are radiant with the reflection of God’s glory. But too much light devastates the eyes. To see too much is to be blind.
Corman, like many film people in Sixties’ Hollywood, spent years in Freudian psychoanalysis. Describing his Poe pictures, Corman said that their essence was captured in the idea of a small child wandering through a dark and forbidding mansion. The child comes to a locked door and hears sounds coming from inside that both alarm and excite him. Corman said: “(He can hear father and mother behind the door.) What is father doing to mother? – it could be murder because what he hears sounds pretty violent: the bed springs are bouncing around, he hears cries, and that’s pretty frightening to him because his parents represent the only security that he has in the world.”) There are literal locked doors concealing secrets in Corman’s Poe pictures – for instance, in the Masque of Red Death, a sealed chamber contains an altar to Satan at which Black Masses are celebrated; in The Tomb of Ligeia, a locked door hides the mummified corpse of the Lady Ligeia to which the protagonist (played by Vincent Price) pays conjugal visits. X is about seeing too much, penetrating the locked chambers all around us – the monkey sees too much and dies of shock; Dr. Xavier’s eyes rot from the visions to which they are exposed and, in the end, the penalty for too much seeing is to have your eyes plucked out.
Corman initially wrote a four-page treatment for X in which the protagonist was a mad scientist. He, then, rewrote the treatment and made the hero a jazz musician who had taken too many drugs and experienced too many chemically-induced visions. This didn’t satisfy him and so he reverted to the first draft with the mad scientist. There is reputed to be another cut of X with an additional scene. In the last shot, Dr. Xavier stands before the camera with his eyes torn out and blood pouring from empty eye sockets. He screams: “I can still see!”
Corman died on October 7, 2023 at the age of 99.
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