Robert Wise casts a spell with subtlety, smarts, superb acting

The Haunting posterBy Michael Wilmington

The Haunting/1963/Argyle Enterprises, MGM/112 min.

From Shirley Jackson’s eerie, intellectual ghost story “The Haunting of Hill House” director Robert Wise and screenwriter Nelson Gidding weave a classic supernatural thriller, a shocker without gore, a ghost movie seemingly without ghosts. Or is it?

In “The Haunting,” poltergeist investigator John Markway (Richard Johnson) and his group of spook watchers (Claire Bloom, Russ Tamblyn and Julie Harris) are ensconced in a notorious old dark house together. Harris gives a movie-stealing performance as repressed spinster Nell Lance, who succumbs to Hill House’s shivery spell and terror-laced eroticism. Like Jack Nicholson in “The Shining,Harris makes you feel the story’s terror – the menace and the entrapment of Hill House as Nell is pulled into the evil of the haunted domicile’s very dark past.

The cast is well nigh perfect, from Johnson’s enthusiastic and charming investigator, Bloom’s ambiguous, fancily severe Greenwich Village lesbian, Julie, to Lois Maxwell (Miss Moneypenny of the James Bond series) as Mrs. Markway.

Tamblyn, who will be present for discussion at the 7 p.m. Tuesday screening of “The Haunting” in Westwood, plays smart-alecky nonbeliever Luke Sanderson. Tamblyn was reteaming here with director Wise, who had guided the actor to the highlight of his career, as Jet gangleader Riff in the 1961 Best Picture Oscar winner “West Side Story.”

Wise’s movie is quite faithful to Jackson’s acclaimed novel. The dialogue is literate and tense. The movie’s tasteful production design and the crystal-sharp black and white cinematography (by Davis Boulton) give this picture, shot in England, a classic look. It’s the kind of brainy, spooky cinematic treat Wise might have whipped up for producer Val Lewton in the ’40s, in their RKO prime time of “The Body Snatcher” and “The Curse of the Cat People” if they’d only had this kind of budget.

Roman Polanski once named Wise’s “The Haunting” as one of his favorite movies. It’s a shame that Polanski didn’t direct the 1999 remake of “The Haunting,” which was messed up by the producers and director Jan De Bont, and not helped by its big budget and gaudy effects. Subtlety, intelligence and superb acting are what cast the spell for Wise and company. Polanski probably would have brought all that back and made the movie sexy to boot – something the 1963 “Haunting” doesn’t really need.

‘The Haunting’ marks 50 years with screening in Westwood

The Haunting posterCelebrating its 50th anniversary, “The Haunting” will screen at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 29, at the Regent Theatre in Westwood.

Dr. John Markway (Richard Johnson) is psyched to spend a few weeks at a 19th Century New England mansion – need I say haunted? – in order to study its creepiness. As you might suspect, things don’t go to plan. Also starring Julie Harris, Claire Bloom and Russ Tamblyn, who will attend Tuesday’s screening as a special guest. The evening is also a chance to pay tribute to Julie Harris, who died this summer.

At the time of its release, critic Judith Crist called the film “a thoroughly satisfying ghost story for grownups … completely contemporary in its psychological overtones and implications.”

Nelson Gidding wrote the script based on a Shirley Jackson novel; Robert Wise directs. Jan de Bont remade “The Haunting” in 1999, starring Liam Neeson, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Lili Taylor and Owen Wilson.

You can buy tickets here.

The Noir File: Tracy is tops in Lang’s anti-lynching classic ‘Fury’

By Michael Wilmington and Film Noir Blonde

A guide to classic film noir and neo-noir on cable TV. All the movies are from the current schedule of Turner Classic Movies (TCM), which broadcasts them uncut and uninterrupted. The times are Eastern Standard and (Pacific Standard).

PICK OF THE WEEK

Fury” (1936, Fritz Lang). Monday, Oct. 8, 8 p.m. (5 p.m.)

Spencer Tracy stars in “Fury,” one of the most Germanic of Fritz Lang’s American movies.

The two great American anti-lynching movies are Fritz Lang’s 1936 classic “Fury,” and William Wellman’s great 1943 Western “The Ox-Bow Incident.” “Fury” is the more powerful of the two, the more effective, the more memorable. Lang’s film, which he also co-wrote, is an explosive saga of a Depression-era small city descending into lynch hysteria. Spencer Tracy, at his youthful naturalistic best, is Joe Wilson, a decent, ordinary, working-class guy who stops his car in the town and is mistaken for a kidnapper. Locked in jail despite his desperate protestations of innocence, Joe is then subject to a terrifying nocturnal assault by the maddened townspeople, who drive away the craven police guards and burn the jail down, killing Joe – they think.

But Joe is alive, having fled back to the big city and his family and fiancée (Sylvia Sidney). And he is now consumed with obsessive dreams of fiery revenge and awful retribution. What happens in the course of that revenge may be unlikely, but “Fury” is still gripping, frightening and hypnotic. It’s one of the most Germanic of Lang’s American movies, one of the strongest social message dramas of the ’30s, and as obvious a precursor of ’40s film noir as Lang’s1931 masterpiece “M.” With Walter Brennan, Bruce Cabot, Walter Abel and Frank Albertson. Screenplay by Lang and Bartlett Cormack, from a story by Norman Krasna.

Saturday, Oct. 6

“Party Girl” is pure Nick Ray: romantic, moody and violent. Shown: John Ireland, Cyd Charisse.

6 a.m. (3 a.m.): “Party Girl” (1958, Nicholas Ray). In Nick Ray’s lusciously colorful and nervy gangland tale, Robert Taylor is a handsome mob attorney who milks sympathy from juries by walking on his crutches. Cyd Charisse is the leggy nightclub dancer/party girl he loves and Lee J. Cobb is Cyd’s other lover: Rico, the Chicago mob boss who carries a little vile of acid for anyone who double-crosses him. Set in 1930s Chicago, this is pure Ray: romantic, moody and violent. With John Ireland and Kent Smith.

Sunday, Oct. 7

4 a.m. (1 a.m.): “No Orchids for Miss Blandish” (1948, St. John Legh Clowes). A real oddity: British novelist James Hadley Chase’s bizarre take on American crime fiction, complete with a twisted gang boss, a kidnapped heiress, a cynical newsman, gunsels galore and pink gin. (Later remade quite well by Robert Aldrich in 1971 as “The Grissom Gang.”) With Jack LaRue and Linden Travers.

John Garfield

Tuesday, Oct. 9

1:30 p.m. (10:30 a.m.): “The John Garfield Story” (2003, David Heeley). Documentary-bio of the great, sensitive tough guy and New York City-born film noir star.

Wednesday. Oct. 10

8 p.m. (5 p.m.): “The Haunting” (1963, Robert Wise). From Shirley Jackson’s shivery, intellectual, supernatural novel “The Haunting of Hill House” – about a group of mostly amateur spook watchers (Richard Johnson, Claire Bloom, Russ Tamblyn and movie-stealer Julie Harris) in an “old dark house” – noir and horror master Robert Wise (“The Body Snatcher,” “Born to Kill”) and screenwriter Nelson Gidding weave a classic ghost movie, seemingly without ghosts. (Or is it?)

Thursday, Oct. 11 (Robert Aldrich Night)

(Robert Aldrich Night begins at 8 p.m. (5 p.m.) with a great adventure movie: Jimmy Stewart, Richard Attenborough and Peter Finch in 1965’s “The Flight of the Phoenix.”)

10:30 p.m. (7:30 p.m.): “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” (1962, Robert Aldrich).

1 a.m. (10 p.m.): “The Legend of Lylah Clare” (1968, Robert Aldrich). Perverse backstage thriller about an obsessive Hollywood movie director (Peter Finch) trying to recreate the image of his dead wife, film legend Lylah Clare, in the body of a new blonde bombshell actress (Kim Novak). Echoes of “Vertigo” and “Baby Jane” abound. With Ernest Borgnine.

3:15 a.m. (12:15 a.m.): “Kiss Me Deadly” (1955, Robert Aldrich).