The Sadist
(1963)
Director: James Landis
Cast: Arch Hall Jr., Richard Alden, Marilyn Manning
There are several ways one can break into the motion
picture industry and become a star. The most obvious way is to be a
great actor and keep going to audition after audition and hope that a
casting director will see your talent and get you hired as an actor in
a movie. Of course, there are potential pitfalls with that strategy.
There are already a lot of established (and talented) actors already in
the motion picture industry, and casting directors will more often than
not go for someone who is established than with an unknown. And even if
a casting director is looking for a fresh face, you will be competing
with hundreds of other struggling actors, many who will be just as
talented as you. Maybe even more so. With all that in mind, it's no
wonder that some people wanting to act in a motion picture will try
other kind of ways to break into the business. One of the most clichéd
alternate methods is the "casting couch" method, offering yourself
sexually to people in the motion picture industry who are responsible
for casting. Oh, I am sure this has happened several times in real
life, but I am also sure it hasn't happened that many times. It would
be hard for a casting person to justify to the producers putting up the
budget of a movie the sudden casting of someone who isn't talented at
acting. Another technique that someone with stars in their eyes can do
to land a role is to make their own movie. In the 1993 movie Road To Revenge (also known as GetEven - no, there's no space in this
alternate title), a man
by the name of John de Hart wrote, directed, and produced this vanity
vehicle for himself. He even got B movie legends like Wings Hauser and
William Smith as supporting players to make it appear like a legitimate
movie. But from reports I've read, the movie was more or less an excuse
for de Hart to get into sex scenes and sing multiple songs on the
soundtrack. It's reportedly unbelievably bad - which of course means
that I have desperately looked for a copy to review for years, to no
avail.
There is another way one can break into the motion
picture business as an actor, though it's a way that seems so silly and
unbelievable that it's reserved for comedies about the motion picture
industry. But it's happened at least once, with the case of actor Arch
Hall Jr. Hall was an actor who appeared in six movies in the 1960s, and
got cast in the lead in each movie for one specific reason - he knew
the head of the studio that made these movies. And the head of the
studio, Fairway International Pictures, was his father, Arch Hall Sr.
To be fair to Arch Hall Jr., he seemed to know that he had limitations
as an actor. He reportedly told his father, "Gee, Pop, I can't sing,"
when his father brought up the idea of him singing in a motion picture.
Hall Sr. convinced his son by pointing out a lot of people had done
well in movies without a proper singing voice. Despite his father's
encouragement, and being cast in one of his father's movies after
another, Hall Jr., for the most part, didn't give performances that
exactly pleased the critics. One movie historian years later called
him, "[A] twerpy, pug-nosed pompadoured blond actor... who was only
slightly better looking than Michael J. Pollard, but without the quirky
charm or talent... He was amateurish and obnoxious, whether playing
cowboys, rock singers, young hoods, or young gentlemen.... He seemed
not to actually care about acting." Another film historian wrote about
Hall Jr. in the camp classic Eegah!: "He has
a face that only a mother could love... The script gives Mr. Hall every
chance to make a fool of himself, and the young actor makes the most of
each opportunity."
I have seen all six of Arch Hall Jr.'s sixties movies,
which include Eegah!,
Wild
Guitar, Deadwood
'76, The
Choppers, and The Nasty Rabbit.
All five of those movies are bad movies, though to be fair I thought Deadwood '76 was
kind of weirdly watchable despite its many shortcomings. And I will
admit that in those five movies, Arch Hall Jr. simply wasn't very good.
The critical comment from the previous paragraph of this review
regarding that he seemed not to actually care about acting many times
in his movies does seem to be true. But if one was to take a look at
Arch Hall Jr.'s full filmography, one will see that there was one movie where he not only seemed
to be trying hard to act, he actually gave, despite all odds against
him, a great performance. That movie was the 1963 movie The Sadist. And,
unlike his other movies, the parts of the movie surrounding him were
also well done. Before getting into describing how all of that is so,
first a look at the plot of The Sadist. In
southern California, school teachers Ed (Alden, Deadline),
Carl (Don Russell), and Doris (Helen Hovey,) are driving through the
countryside on their way to attend a baseball game in Los Angeles.
During their journey, they experience car trouble, and pull off the
road into a filling station slash junkyard in the hope they can get
their car repaired. They are mystified to find the place deserted, with
troubling clues like discovering unfinished meals in a house on the
lot. But it doesn't take long for them to find out what happens. Out of
nowhere, a young psycho (Hall), with his equally demented girlfriend
Judy (Manning, Eegah!)
pops up, brandishing a gun. It doesn't take long for the three teachers
to realize the psycho is one Charlie Tibbs, an interstate fugitive who
has already caused several deaths in another state - and seems very
willing to add the three teachers to his body count. The three teachers
manage to save their lives by promising to fix their car so that
Charlie and Judy can drive off... but Charlie's sadistic behavior soon
make the teachers realize that Charlie has no plans to let them live
once the car is fixed. They must do something, but the odds are not
great with a loaded gun constantly pointed at them.
For the life of me, I can't figure out why Arch Hall Jr.
gave such a great performance in The Sadist
when in those five other movies of his that I mentioned in the previous
paragraph, he was so unbelievably bad. He was still working for his
producer father, and director James Landis after this movie directed
Hall in two of those other Hall movies I mentioned. The most plausible
theory that I could come up with is that Hall not only saw the
potential with this particular role, he saw he could have fun playing a
downright rotten dude. Certainly, the potential for the part of Charlie
Tibbs would be evident to many other actors. Charlie Tibbs has been
written to be one of the most loathsome characters ever to be found in
a 1960s movie. The best that can be said about him is that he's very
confident. When he first appears, the first thing he says to the three
teachers is simply, "Just keep working on that car," while brandishing
his gun. And that turns out to be one of the kinder gestures he puts
forth in the entire film. When he learns a little later that the three
protagonists are teachers, he is almost delighted, because he reveals
he hates teachers because of what happened in his past, and now has in
his mind an excuse to torture these three innocents further. But that's
not to say that his lack of education has made him stupid; Charlie
during the course of the movie shows some true criminal cunning,
managing to spot several times when the three teachers try various
schemes in an attempt to get the upper hand. Smart people, sadists or
not, make for more formidable opponents. But what's even more dangerous
about Charlie is that not only has he pretty much lost any sense of
humanity, he sometimes can't even see what's in his best interest.
There's one scene when Ed is working on repairing the car for Charlie
when Charlie squeezes a few shots from his gun, aiming very close to
Ed. Charlie finds this near killing of his ticket out of there
disturbingly amusing, but we in the audience don't laugh because the
person doing this is clearly one sick individual.
As well-written the part of Charlie Tibbs is, the best
writing in the world wouldn't make much difference if the actor playing
Charlie wasn't up to the task of bringing the character to life. But
Arch Hall Jr. gave it his all with this role, and Charlie is both a
believable and scary bad dude. With his creepy laugh, piercing glances,
and seemingly without effort changing from one various extreme (and
convincing) emotion to another - from sadistic enjoyment to pure rage -
Hall is one of the all time great big screen villains. The
relentlessness of Hall's nastiness does eventually get a little hard to
believe - it would soon tire out your typical real life psychopath -
but Hall does succeed in making Charlie someone you'll love to hate.
But he's not the only other person in The Sadist
to give a good performance. Marilyn Manning, as Charlie's girlfriend
Judy, despite having almost no dialogue during the course of the movie,
executes great use of body language and facial expressions to show that
her character is almost as seriously disturbed as Charlie. In
comparison to Hall and Manning, the performances of the actors playing
the three protagonists aren't as memorable - though in a movie like
this, it's hard to upstage the antagonists. But to be fair, they do
find some moments to shine a little. Richard Alden does compliment the
writing of his schoolteacher character by giving the air of someone who
has some believable skills but is also not a superman, which gives his
character some sympathy. Helen Hovey's character is pretty much a
typical 1960s female wimp, though she has one good scene where after
being briefly tortured by Charlie, she silently tries to regain her
dignity before walking back to the other protagonists. Don Russell
probably gives the most memorable performance of all three protagonist
actors, showing some authority before things turn bad, and subsequently
showing the secret helpless side of his character when Charlie starts
putting him through the wringer.
I've mostly talked about the actors and their characters
in The Sadist
up to this point, but I also want to talk about more about the
contributions writer and director James Landis made to this movie. The
script for The
Sadist
is not just well written with its characters. While almost all of the
movie takes place in one fairly small location, Landis on a regular
basis injects unexpected moments to make sure things don't get boring,
such as one moment when the five main characters unexpectedly get a
couple of visitors that could throw off the plans of Charlie - or the
protagonists. Such moments also prevent the movie from getting
predictable, especially one development that genuinely shocked me
during the climactic sequence. Being the director as well as the
writer,
Landis had the story play out in a manner few other movies have used -
playing out in real time. Except for the one-time use of dissolving
from one shot to another in the first few seconds of the movie after
the opening credits, what we see plays out without any jumps ahead in
time. This technique works extremely well for this particular movie.
There is no break in the mood of the movie - the tension slowly builds
as the story progresses, without giving us a chance to let our guard
down. As the climax gets closer and closer we see that something big -
bad or good - will happen,
not might
happen, and there's nothing we can do about it. All we can do is remain
transfixed by what's happening and building up, and hope Landis will
give us some mercy at the end. The only real flaw I found with Landis'
direction was that he used music on the soundtrack a bit too often. The
music is not awful - it sometimes does its job - but for the most part
I found the movie more suspenseful when there was natural silence as a
backdrop to what the characters were saying and doing. Despite this
flaw, The Sadist
is a real sleeper. It may be hard to believe that a very low budget
drive-in 1960s thriller has more bite and skill than many mainstream
thrillers of its time (or even today.) But if Arch Hall Jr. could find
it in himself to give a great performance, I say that anything is
possible.
(Posted June 3, 2020)
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See also: Curfew, If I Die Before I Wake, Rabid
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