Post by phantomparticle on Oct 20, 2020 2:09:46 GMT
Dementia (1953)/Daughter of Horror (1957)
A woman in a seedy hotel room wakes from a nightmare, arms herself with a switchblade knife and walks out into the night.
Adrienne Barrett, identified only as The Gamin, was the secretary of John J. Parker, son of the head of a theatrical chain, who was inspired by Barrett’s real life dream to write and produce a psychological thriller that probed the mind of a psychotic killer. The finished product was a silent film with an unearthly score by composer George Antheil and vocalization by Marni Nixon.
The late 1940’s and early 1950’s saw a number of movies based on the treatment of mental illness (The Snake Pit, The Three Faces of Eve) all of which were told from the point of view of the medical profession. Dementia reverses this trend, finding its antecedents in expressionist films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The House of Usher (1928), in an attempt to portray insanity from the inside out by completely immersing us in the impressions and sounds of a deranged woman with an Electra complex.
After completion, Dementia went through no less than 12 private showings for censorship groups, each one of which promptly and unequivocally denounced the film as abhorrent and vile without any redeeming social value. A few drew up lists of the most egregious scenes in the movie and demanded cuts that would have rendered the story completely incomprehensible. As a result, Parker withdrew the film from consideration and it languished unseen and forgotten for over a year.
By 1955, film censorship was beginning to loosen in the movie industry. Otto Preminger had gotten The Moon is Blue (1953) into release after his own censorship battles. The production code was finally changed after another battle over The Man with the Golden Arm (1955). Dementia was granted a seal by The New York censor board in 1955 and the movie was available for distribution.
Unfortunately for Parker, he no longer owned the rights to the movie, which had been picked up by Jack H. Harris, who made a few cuts, added an insipid audio track voiced by Ed McMahon, retitled it Daughter of Horror and buried the movie in the drive-in circuit in 1957. Harris included a short clip of the film in his science fiction classic, The Blob.
For the next 45 years the only version available to the few people who saw it at rare screenings was the abridged copy with the psychobabble sound track.
The Kino dvd release includes the original Dementia and the edited Daughter of Horror, plus Dementia: A Case Study, an essay on the making of the movie and its two year battle with the censors.
Actor Bruno VeSota, who co-wrote the script with Parker, claimed to have directed most of it, which may have some basis in fact, as Parker had no filmmaking experience. The bulky VeSota had a long career from 1947 to 1974 and is best remembered by horror fans for The Undead, A Bucket of Blood and Attack of the Giant Leeches. His last role was on the Kojak tv series (1974) prior to his death that year.
Photographer William C. Thomas, who appears to have spent most of his career working on totally obscure features, began in silent films in 1914. I looked up about a dozen of his films at random and couldn’t find any mentioned in Leonard Maltin’s Classic Film Movie Guide.
Thomas shot the infamous Maniac (1934) and dozens of forgettable dramas and westerns before going to work for Ed Wood, Jr. on Glen or Glenda, Plan 9 From Outer Space and The Sinister Urge (his last movie).
Thomas’s high contrast lighting and sharp photography on Wood’s Plan 9 is one of the few actual positives of the movie. He brings a highly stylized, crystal clear imagery to Dementia, coupled with some amazing and intense camera angles. Thomas is credited with 67 movies in his career. He died in 1963.
Although not an actress, Adrienne Barrett does a remarkable job as a psychotic waif driven to walk the night streets with a stiletto in her pocket. Another of VeSota‘s claims is that he used tricks to get her reactions, but we get no sense that she is being manipulated off screen to get the desired result.
Under Thomas’s sharp photography, Barrett’s features are etched with cruelty, sneering and laughing manically at one moment, transformed into a mask of terror at another.
A moment of introspection, followed by the click of a switchblade signaling a disturbing sub level drive that will send her into the evening.
Picked up by a pimp and sold to a rich man (VeSota), she watches in disgust as he finishes a large meal in his hotel room, then lights up a cigar. Thomas frames the shot with VeSota’s cigar in foreground and Barrett above him with crossed legs in the background. Many of the Freudian symbolisms embedded in the movie appear to have escaped the wrath of the censors who were more concerned with violence than aberrant sexual behavior.
A flashback to The Gamin’s earlier life reveals the source of her madness. This clip was featured in The Blob as Daughter of Horror, with the inane dialogue by Ed McMahon.
The Gamin attempts to retrieve a clue that will link her to a murder in one of the most disturbing scenes in the movie. It was cut from the film for 45 years until eventually restored for the Kino release. And when, at the end, it looks as if everything has been wrapped up and explained, Parker has one final shock for the audience.
Dementia is an hallucinatory journey into insanity that has lost none of its visual power. Dismissed by critics as lurid, tasteless and even prone to corrupting the minds of young and impressionable teenagers, it was a movie decades ahead of its time. Not until David Lynch’s Eraserhead would audiences see anything comparable to the surreal landscape of Dementia.