Macabre (1958)

 

William Castle maybe the USA’s second-most beloved yet still totally disrespected Filmmaker, but only two Director’s really fit that description: 1.) the boundlessly energetic but wholly incompetent Ed Wood Jr and 2.) the equally energetic, far more competent, but still not as good as he thought he was, Castle. As Producer and/or  Director and he had forty credits under his belt by 1958 but this film is his assumed, though not actual, Directorial debut, because everything we love and mock about Castle starts here.

 

With “Macabre” he showed us what he’d remain famous for over the rest of his career, a gift of Marketing that made him successful but demeaned him before his peers. Castle was the last, and greatest, of the Barnstorming Marketers in USA Filmmaking, his gimmicks are now legend, and more than once his Gimmicks under-cut the respect the films deserved … but not in this case. In this film really wasn’t very good, but the $1,000 Life Insurance policy from Lloyd's of London offered to every customer should they should die of fright, the hiring Nurses to attend screenings, and he, himself, jumping out of Coffins at screenings, was genius.

 

Getting accidently locked in a Coffin and almost suffocating during one of those screening was somewhat-less so.

 

This Stunt might have been inspired by an incident during the first run of “The Quartermass Xperiment” (1955) where a child seemed to have died of fright while watching that film. But this wasn’t Castle first time on that merry-go-round. To advertise an earlier anti-Fascist film, he self-vandalized a theater with Swastikas. The fame this brought him led to, a decade and a half after his death, Actor John Goodman affectionately parodying him in the movie “Matinee” (1993).

 

Why was “Macade” so bad? It didn’t have to be that way. There are compelling and original aspects of the plot, but this was a film being strangled by Gimmicks even before it went into pre-Production. It’s based on a novel “The Marble Forest” by Theo Durrant, but the Author was actually twelve Writers writing a chapter each with the great Critic/Novelist William White AKA Anthony Boucher in charge of keeping things coherent. I haven’t read the novel, but I’m thinking maybe it wasn’t the Scriptwriter’s fault that the pieces failing to fit together, maybe he imported the ill-fitting pieces from the source material. The Screenwriter Robb White was typically a lot better than this, he wrote Castles best films of the next half decade and many, many, episodes of TV’s “Perry Mason” (first aired 1961).

 

So, here’s the set-up: A Small-Town Doctor’s daughter has disappeared and a mysterious phone call says she’s been buried alive and he only has a few hours before she suffocates. The Caller doesn’t ask for a Ransom but claims Revenge as his Motive.

 

Had this been better written, it would’ve been akin to a novel by Author Harlan Coben where an immediate crisis emerges quickly, but that crisis is laden with Sins and Secrets of the past; moving forward requires dissecting complex and wrought Relationships because facing the Past is the only path to the Future. Coben’s novels are swamps of backstory, but his skill in over-turning the rocks, revealing the decay underneath, is masterful. This film isn’t masterful, not by a longshot.

 

Though not the main character, Jode Wetherby (Phillip Tongue) is the center of everything. Jode is the wealthiest man in town but in the then-present but he’s enfeebled by a Heart Condition and Emotionally Broken because of the fairly recent deaths of both his daughters, Alice (Dorothy Morris) and Nancy (Christine White). Exploring that requires a lot of flashbacks …

 

Alice had dated the Police Chief Jim Tyloe (Jim Bakus), but cast him aside to marry Doctor Rodney Barrett (William Prince). She bore Rodney a daughter Marge (Linda Guderman) whom Jode dotes on and who will be the later Kidnap Victim.

 

Alice died while giving birth to Marge and Rodney was not there for her, he was with his rich mistress Sylvia Stevenson (Alice Monroe). Jim’s enmity towards Rodney runs deep and it’s shared by much of the Town. Several Characters wonder aloud why Rodeny doesn’t just leave.

 

In the wake of Alice’s death, Jim began a tenuous relationship with dead Alice’s sister Nancy, who was a blind, a well-traveled, socialite who was both decadent and self-loathing. She evades commitment to Jim because Jim is obviously still in love with dead Alice (more so than widower Doctor Rodney) and the only person she seems to truly care for is her father Jode, though she does everything she can to avoid being near him.

 

Soon, Nancy is dead as well. After finding out she was pregnant, she begged Rodney for an Abortion but he refused (the decriminalization of Abortion in the USA didn’t begin until 1967, not completed until 1973, but that was significantly reversed in 2022). This was followed by her death either by Suicide or a botched Abortion (the Town’s Gossips didn’t know the real details). The Kidnapping takes place right before Nancy’s Funeral and Burial.

 

At the time of the Kidnapping, Rodeny was leading-on two women, he’s still with Sylvia but seems to be starting something up with his nurse Polly Baron (Jaquline Scott). He is also so afraid of Jim he won’t go to the Police but instead ropes Polly into a futile search for where Marge is buried.

 

There are nicely executed scenes, like Rodney and Polly first visit to a Graveyard, terrified that their being watched. During that scene, feeble Jode accidently Murders of the Cemetery’s Care Taker (Howard Hoffman) making it even harder for Rodney to go to the Police and all-the-while the clock continues to tick away.

 

This puts us a half-hour into the hour-and-ten-minute film.

 

I feel I’m making to sound better than it is. There’s a lot of incompetence, like mixing up day-and-night shots. Most of the acting is terrible because the script demanded such unnatural actions and reactions from the Characters. Characters Jim and Nancy are the best written so it’s not surprising that their Performers Bakus and White and the standouts of the Cast.

 

Many details are non-sensical, like a machine in the funeral home that makes the sound of breathing in order to … what? The Funeral was at 11pm and the Burial at Midnight … why? Rodney’s refusal to go to the Community and call for a massive search party is incomprehensible as was his wasting precious time going to Nancy’s Funeral. Jim knows Rodeny’s lying to him but can’t seem to recognize that what Robney’s hiding has already been exposed. There are explanations for (almost) all these things revealed in the Climax but, as typical when a Climatic Speech is required to resolve all the illogics, the Explanations are both too late and still illogical.

 

But Castle went all out for this film, even Mortgaging his house to pay for it, suing and half-blackmailing major studios for the Marketing budget (more costly than the film) and traveling around at least part of the country to drum-up business for it. And it worked, the less-than $100,000 for Production plus $125,000 Marketing, it then grossing $1 million by the end of the year, $5 million by the time people stopped counting in 1970.

 

And the World would never be the same.

 

Castle became quite rich on his gimmicks, and kept them up longer than he should. With “Straight Jacket” (1964) he started to make a stab at more sophistication putting his gimmicks at odds with his new material; Joan Crawford refused to do the film if he indulged in any of those shenanigans, so he didn’t that time, but was at it again with his second Crawford film, “I Saw What You Did” (1965) which nearly got him in serious legal trouble because he encouraged a short-lived fad of crank-phone calls.

 

The Producer/Director that Castle most wanted to emulate was Alfred Hitchcock (this was most obvious in “Straight Jacket”) and Hitchcock was not above borrowing from Castle (most evident in the marketing of “Psycho” (1960)) but was classier about it. Meanwhile, when MGM lifted “Macabre’s” (1964) Marketing gimmick whole-cloth for the remake of “Night Must Fall” (1964) which was the most serious-minded film mentioned in this paragraph, chasing away the audience who would’ve liked it, pissing of the Audience that showed up because it wasn’t what they were promised, and the movie bombed.

 

Castle also had the rights to Ira Levin’s novel “Rosemary’s Baby” (1967) and was desperate to Director but, because God is Kind, the studio put their foot down and gave it to Roman Polansky. Imagine how he would’ve marketed that? Free baby-dolls that smelled of sulfur?

 

Trailer:

Macabre Trailer 1 (1958) - YouTube