The book was always in my family, a two-volume set of the works of Stephen Vincent Benet. One of the books contained Benet's poetry including the epic "John Brown's Body" that I read eagerly as a child. The other volume collected short stories by Benet, including one called "Johnny Pye and the Foolkiller". The story was published in 1938 and I also read it several times when I was little. I was surprised, therefore, when TCM showed a 1965 film called The Fool Killer as part of a double feature programmed by the horror movie director, Joe Dante (this was on July 5, 2025). I had never heard of the film and supposed that it was based on Benet's story. But, in fact, film's credits indicate that it derives from a 1954 novel by Helen Eustis. The plot has some similarities with Benet's short story -- both involve an abused orphan who encounters the "fool killer" in his picaresque wanderings. These similarities, most likely, derive from the common source in folklore for the story -- children once were intimidated by their parents by being told that there is a sinister "fool killer" who lies in ambush with a sharp knife or axe to punish those who behave stupidly.
Dante, an estimable director in his own right (most famous for Gremlins) was anxious to promote the 1965 film as an unsung masterpiece. In fact, the picture is not wholly successful and seems strangely muted. The Fool Killer contains some outstanding sequences but the movie doesn't cohere as a whole. It is characterized by audacious, experimental camerawork, that is, also, in most instances, too fancy by half. The acting is fine, but the disorganized and rather disheveled plot doesn't go anywhere and there's an aura of futility about the movie. In his conversation with Joe Mankiewicz on TCM, Dante pointed out that in the last shot, the camera is under a locomotive, filming the wheels from below -- then, the camera moves beneath the train, emerging on the opposite side of the tracks to, then, tilt up to show the railroad cars departing down the track. Dante admits that this is a pointlessly elaborate shot, requiring track beneath the tracks and a tunnel to be excavated through the railroad embankment, clearly a massive amount of effort to secure a fifteen second shot that most viewers will scarcely notice. Dante asserts that this laborious final shot demonstrates in general the care lavished upon the movie. I'm not so sure of that proposition. Some contemporary reviewers (and there were few, almost no one saw the movie) criticized the picture as a compendium of flashy camera techniques that don't really contribute to the narrative.
An orphan named George Mellish is working on his foster parent's farm. He knocks over a butter churn and gets a whipping from his stepmom. More humiliated than harmed, George runs away from the farm. He rides on the undercarriage of a passing train to a nearby town. When he hops off the train to obey the call of nature, the locomotive speeds away stranding him in a hilly wooded landscape bisected by big, slow-moving rivers. He comes upon a ramshackle cottage on the river bank. This turns out to be the homestead of an old drunk called "Dirty James." The old man is filthy but kind. The 12-year runaway, George, and the old man ramble around the empty countryside -- they fish and play in a mud puddle and the drunk tells George about how he was stalked by the Fool Killer when he was a young man; the Fool Killer scared him into the arms of his wife, the "cleanest woman alive" and she tormented her with her hygienic ways until her death. The old man and boy go into town where George collapses with some kind of sickness. For a while, he lives with a kindly couple in town. A little girl tries to get the feverish George to give her a kiss. (Her name is Blessing Angelina and she has a "boil" on her butt, expressing, she says, "either bad blood or the meanness in (her) coming out." In any event, it keeps her parents from spanking her.) Blessing Angelina is a strange apparition -- she has a bonnet like white bunny ears and wears thick round spectacles. Concerned that Blessing Angelina may want him as her boyfriend, George flees into the forest and where he wanders in a "day for night" twilight, affrighted by various dead trees. In the darkness, he encounters a campfire where a very strange young man is squatting by the flames. This is Milo Bogardus (although he later admits he stole the name from someone killed in the Civil War). Milo seems to be a menacing version of the Fool Killer. He carries a blade and a hatchet. Milo and George become friends. They go swimming together in an odd spring full of submerged rocks. Milo seems to be have been damaged in the Civil War -- he's a sort of mystical hermit-- there is talk about having seen the face of God in a halo of glory. In one scene, some kind of nameless panic seizes Milo and runs wildly through the woods, finally clutching a hold of two saplings as if to keep himself from spinning off into space. Milo says that George "could be his brother." A religious revival camp meeting is setting up in the valley. George wants to attend but Milo discourages him. Nonetheless, they go to the revival meeting where a menacing preacher delivers a terrifying hellfire and brimstone sermon. George wants to be saved and answers the altar call, summoned to the front of the tent by the preacher's scary-looking factotum, a man playing a trumpet. The next morning, the camp is in disarray and George is sleeping under a wagon. People are distraught: someone has murdered the preacher, presumably, the Fool Killer. Milo is missing. George goes into town where he is given a bedroom in which to sleep by a friendly older couple. In the middle of the night, Milo appears brandishing an axe. Then, he vanishes. An hour or so later, at dawn, he appears on the roof of the family's house. For some reason, he jumps from the roof and dies from the fall. Wanderlust again summons George to the open road. A train appears. George watches the train departing and says that he has a "restless feeling." The train goes down the track and, at last, vanishes.
This peculiar film is shot in very expressive black and white. The night scenes, however, are marred by poor "day for night" effects. There are some sequences simulating illness by using blurry, wobbly camera tricks -- these are also not successful. Many interiors feature very high-angle shots, as if filming through the roof of the set. Anthony Perkins plays the enigmatic Milo Bogardus. He's performing a variant on his schizophrenic in Hitchcock's Psycho. A boy named Eddie Albert, Jr. plays the part of George -- he has an odd squinty and pinched face, but is very good. (The boy is the son of the movie star Eddie Albert who played as second-banana to Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday; of course, Eddie Albert was most famous for performing with Eva Gabor in the TV series Green Acres.) The picture was shot around Knoxville, Kentucky where it had its premiere (and apparently only theatrical showing); something went wrong, the movie wasn't marketed at all, and, after a few years, went straight to TV and from TV into the abyss where it seems to have been completely forgotten. With its eerie vistas and strange reticent plot, the movie resembles Herk Harvey's "one and done" picture Carnival of Souls. The picture was directed by a Mexican filmmaker named Servando Gonzalez. The picture obviously imitates Charles Laughton's 1955 Night of the Hunter and it was programmed as a double feature with that movie. The comparison is highly invidious to The Fool Killer, a stylish picture but one that is weirdly inconsequential.
No comments:
Post a Comment