The Amazing Mr. X (1948, Bernard Vorhaus)

Around the halfway mark, The Amazing Mr. X gets a whole lot more interesting without ever being able to get much better. The film starts as a supernatural thriller, with widow Lynn Bari convinced her dead husband is calling to her, pissed off she’s getting close to accepting suitor Richard Carlson’s marriage proposal. Bari’s little sister, Cathy O’Donnell, is pressing her into accepting, while Bari secretly finds Carlson super-annoying. We know she finds him annoying because when she meets mentalist Turhan Bey on the beach, he can read her subconscious and reveal those grievances to her.

It’s a particular sequence with terrible composite shots—not just poorly matched as far as lighting. However, cinematographer John Alton’s achievement is basically never having a well-lighted scene or a well-composed angle on the composite shot. The angles on the backgrounds are wildly off, which might lend to an otherworldly, impressionist vibe, but director Vorhaus never goes for one. And then Bari’s terrible. Lots will change through Mr. X; the film’s got three major big twists, a couple big reveals, but the constant will always be Bari’s terrible performance. It’s not entirely her fault—Muriel Roy Bolton and Ian McLellan Hunter’s script is a combination of mysticism, deception, and light comedy; Vorhaus is particularly inept at the light comedy—but she’s still terrible. She’s never sympathetic, and pretty much everyone else, regardless of performance, manages to be sympathetic at one point or another.

If Bari were good, Mr. X. might be able to overcome its other failings like O’Donnell, Carlson, and Harry Mendoza. O’Donnell’s never good, but she’s enthusiastic; surprisingly, she was twenty-five in the film, she seems younger, not quite teenage but definitely not twenty-five. She’s particularly bad at the supernatural sequences. Actually, Bari’s better at them. O’Donnell plays them like there’s eventually going to be a punchline, which never arrives because it’s not actually light comedy no matter how much the script tries. Bari at least takes them seriously. But there’s some charm to O’Donnell’s failed approach, which gives Mr. X personality.

Especially after O’Donnell falls for Bey. She and Carlson have hired private investigator Mendoza (a real-life magician they presumably cast for his card tricks and not his screen presence; another mistake for the pile). His big idea to snoop on Bey is to get O’Donnell to go undercover for a reading. Except Bey’s able to see right through her subterfuge and instead seduces her.

That plot development—O’Donnell killing the investigation momentum—ought to stall out the picture but instead, Mr. X. does a deep dive into Bey. So the narrative focus goes from Bari to O’Donnell to Bey. It dollies back and widens the narrative in the third act, but it always keeps Bey in the proverbial shot. Partially because he’s the only one who knows everything going on once the third plot twist arrives, partially because he’s the only main actor giving a compelling performance. At the start, it seems like Bey’s going to be a stunt cast, an extended “exotic” cameo, with the focus being on Bari and Carlson… until the plot starts twisting and turning and Mr. X ceases to be predictable.

Even when there’s clarification and revelation, the film’s got another big twist waiting. It’s a neat plot. Shame the script’s bad; with a good script, Mr. X could probably get away with Vorhaus’s mostly inept direction, though it’d still need a better lead performance than Bari. Not even a great one, just a not always bad one.

Mr. X (which is a terrible title, especially since Bey’s name is “Alexis” and they never once lean on the “X”) is neat without ever being cute; a good idea victim of a too low budget, with a surprisingly excellent performance from Bey. He does a whole lot without any help from the director, the script, or his costars. Though O’Donnell’s mooning is believable enough, given the object of her affection.

It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955, Robert Gordon)

I finished watching It Came from Beneath the Sea, which I regret, particularly because the whole reason I didn’t shut it down was for the big special effects finale, when the giant radioactive octopus finally attacks a city. Incidentally, it’s San Francisco, which doesn’t turn out to be anywhere near as cool looking as I had hoped.

The film dashes hopes early on, so when you’re sitting through the second act slog, you know there’s no good reason to be doing it, just that expectation the grand finale is going to be worth it. Ray Harryhausen’s special effects work is, after all, objectively stellar.

Sadly, not much of that quality is on display in Beneath. When we finally get to the giant octopus making landfall and giant tentacling the city… the detail’s not good. Because Beneath is way too cheap. It’s been way too cheap and you can kind of get yourself enthused by convincing yourself the cheap for the human science thriller is so there’s enough money for the finish and then… turns out no. It’s just too cheap.

Too cheap, too poorly directed, too poorly written, too poorly acted. And whoever did the light matching on rear screen projection—photographer Henry Freulich, whoever—might be so bad they’re incompetent at it. There’s no reason it should always look so bad, especially when there’s so much of it. There’s a particularly bad scene with the heroes in a beachfront restaurant where you have to remind yourself to pretend the background is supposed to represent something real to the characters.

Of course… maybe if the acting weren’t terrible. So I guess let’s get into how the acting, directing, and writing all congeal into a toxic slop.

From the first scene—well, actually earlier because the opening text crawl is poorly written and then the narration is not a good choice—but from the first live action scene, it’s clear Beneath is going to have some major acting and directing issues. What isn’t clear, from that first scene, is how bad Kenneth Tobey is going to get; he plays a submarine commander who comes across the giant octopus but doesn’t know what it is. Chuck Griffiths is his XO. Griffiths gives such a terrible performance you can’t see anything else. Time stops for Griffiths’s awfulness. It’s incredible.

Somehow, even though it’s not obvious Tobey’s going to be bad, Gordon’s direction is clearly at fault for some of Griffiths. Because Gordon’s directs all the other actors on the submarine terribly as well. Lots of quite bad acting from a variety of actors, which is going to all change when Tobey gets back to the Nazy and off the ship.

Because then it’s going to be creepy sexual innuendo with Tobey and two scientists working on a lab to discover what he found out at sea. Presumably through tissue tests but the science is never explained because George Worthing Yates and Harold Jacob Smith’s script is dumb.

It’s also extraordinarily sexist. Like, unpacking everything up with Beneath and its single woman—marine biologist Faith Domergue (doing a dinner theatre Marilyn Monroe impression)—would deserve thorough scholarly research if the movie weren’t just a fifties monster movie.

So in the lab it’s Tobey, Domergue, and Donald Curtis. Curtis and Domergue are not hooking up but Tobey thinks they’re hooking up because if he were Curtis, he’d be hooking up with Domergue. Domergue doesn’t seem to have considered hooking up with Curtis, but then starts to make bedroom eyes at him… after having an extremely suggestive clutch with Tobey out of sight from Curtis.

During this scene, while Tobey explains he wants to hook up and fast, Domergue picks up graduated cylinder and strokes it with her hand the rest of the scene.

Later we find out Domergue’s from a “whole new breed of woman,” they think they’re just as smart and just as brave as the men, which is why Domergue doesn’t know consent is bad—Tobey tells her Navy men take, don’t ask—and if she enjoys a kiss, she has to marry that guy.

I can’t remember if that scene is before or after the Navy sends Domergue into debrief a sailor who has seen the giant octopus and she has to seduce him to do it.

I think after.

So, yeah, It Came from Beneath the Sea is a shit show of misogyny, sexism, and male gaze (Tobey and Domergue are also apparently into each other because they’re exhibitionists; while waiting for Curtis to show up later in the movie they’ve been From Here to Eternitying it on the beach with a local cop hanging around nearby). It’s also a bad movie, with bad direction, bad acting (Curtis is somehow worse than Domergue, who’s somehow worse than Tobey, even though she’s his victim), bad writing, and not worth the wait special effects.

There are like two good effects shots in the movie. But it seems like it’s because they didn’t have money to let Harryhausen do a grander finale. The eventual shots of the octopus on land, tentacles going through the streets, are the good ones. They’re just aren’t good enough to make up for the rest. It’d be impossible to make up for the rest. Because the rest isn’t just bad, it’s icky. And bad.

Icky bad.