Word: chiller
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Hollywood vision of the end of the world. It is trumpeted as "the biggest story . . . The single most important film of our time." Last week it had a "Global Premiere," i.e., a simultaneous opening in 17 cities from Melbourne to Moscow. Alas, the version of the Nevil Shute chiller (TIME, Aug. 19, 1957) that Stanley (The Defiant Ones) Kramer has produced and directed turns out to be a sentimental sort of radiation romance, in which the customers are considerately spared any scenes of realistic horror, and are asked instead to accept the movie notion of what is really horrible about...
Novelist Wyndham well knows the first rule in writing a chiller-effective specters must be ectoplasmatter-of-fact-and so he takes the dullest, most ordinary village in England to populate with his monsters. Nothing much noteworthy has happened in Midwich since the Black Death. One day something very odd does happen: every living thing falls into a trance. All who pass through an invisible perimeter pass out. Traffic piles up. Some victims are hauled out by hooks from the edge of this zone of silence: they wake up unharmed. Promptly, of course, official hush-hush seals off Midwich...
Monique (by Dorothy and Michael Blankfort) is a child of the same French novel-The Woman Who Was No More -as the film Diabolique. The two are by no means twins, however. In the stage chiller, when Fernand Ravinel's wife refuses to dissolve their unhappy marriage through divorce, his doctor-mistress Monique suggests dissolving it through murder. As the efficient Monique drowns the wife in a bathtub and then makes her appear to drown in a stream-a Lady Macbeth superintending an Ophelia's fale -a scared Fernand quivers like jelly and wobbles like a tenpin...
Hecht first saw Lancaster act in Burt's only stage venture, the 1945 Broadway flop A Sound of Hunting. They began talking independent production immediately, and two years later they had filmed the B-minus chiller Kiss the Blood off My Hands...
...Bedtime Chillers. Roughhousing with the second shift, Lou Marx likes to pummel and chase them frantically up and down the three-story house, allows the boys to squirt water guns and smash toys to their hearts' content. (Idella feels the boys are working off their aggressive instincts.) Once a week the Marx brothers pile into their parents' 13-ft.-wide bed for the night. There they are treated to a bedtime-story session in which Marx spins chiller-dillers about such bad guys as a deformed villain who sautes children's eyeballs for supper. The "mean-man stories...