Flicker, p.26
Flicker, page 26
Now I wasn’t sure if I should believe him or not. Perhaps Castle had sabotaged his way out of a contract at Universal. I tried to move the conversation toward more familiar ground. “What about Count Lazarus? Do you remember that?”
He stared back vaguely, as if through a heavy fog. “Count Lazarus … the vampire? Max made that? No, I believe that was Bob Siodmak.”
“Count Lazarus was Castle’s vampire—definitely,” I corrected.
“Was he? Lord, we made so many of those.” He laughed. “Vampires! We had them hanging from the rafters. Yes, you’re right. Lazarus. That was Max. We had trouble with that too.”
“What kind of trouble?”
He wagged his head grimly. “Very unpleasant. What Max gave us … well, it was very, very dirty. Never could have cleared the censors. Naked women. He wanted to put naked women on the screen. In America.”
“There’s no nudity in the film,” I reminded him.
“We spent hours, days cutting that movie. Jack Wasserman, Neal Davies … practically the whole Universal executive staff. Lewd, very lewd. How did he expect to get away with that? Native girls, maybe. But white women … ”
“I mean, Mr. Pusey, there’s no actual, real nudity. Even in the original version. I’ve seen the original version.”
“No, that would have been kept by the studio. Probably long since destroyed.”
“Castle’s cameraman, Zip Lipsky, saved a lot of Castle’s films—the uncut versions. I’ve seen them. He showed them to me.”
“Zip! Excellent man. Whatever became of him?”
I filled him in on what I knew about Zip down to his death. Pusey showed honest sorrow.
“He was one of the best. Too good for Universal, I’ll admit that. Just a natural-born shooter.”
“Mr. Pusey, I’ve seen the uncut prints of both Count Lazarus and Feast of the Undead,” I went on, returning to the point in question. “There’s nothing you could call obscene in either movie, certainly no nudity.”
Pusey seemed to be scouring the dusty corners of his memory. “Well, no, not that you could see.”
“I beg your pardon.”
“It wasn’t anything you could see.”
“I don’t understand. Either you see it or you don’t.”
He was thinking strenuously now, digging deep. “Well, it wasn’t that simple. I remember we argued a lot about that movie—where to cut, how much to cut. We even … yes, now I recall, we even brought in some of the secretaries and receptionists. We asked them to look at the movie. They all agreed it was a dirty movie. There was one girl, she walked out. Very angry. Very embarrassed. She thought the whole movie was practically pornography. The trouble was: we couldn’t seem to agree on what we had seen, the group of us. Isn’t that strange? We all had these different ideas about it. Myself, I don’t think I saw any nudity, not really. But … something else.”
“What do you mean?”
“Have you ever walked into someplace … a house, a neighborhood? And you just know it’s bad. A bad, a nasty place. You don’t have to see anything. You have a feeling. It can be worse than seeing. Because it’s everywhere, soaked in deep.” Pusey’s voice faltered and went fuzzy. He seemed now at last to be bringing his distant memories of Castle into sharp focus across the years. The reminiscing had ceased being enjoyable. “He was not a nice man. I never liked working with him. It wasn’t just the arrogance. Something else. We made lots of morbid movies at Universal. They were our big earners. Dracula, the werewolf, zombies. But really, you know, they were sort of jokes. Who could take them seriously? Bela Lugosi … you see what I mean. When we were finished, we walked away from them, left it all behind. But not Max. Max was morbid. Inside, a morbid man. These things were in him, not just in the movie. I think he was very sick, do you know what I mean?”
There was little more I could draw out of Pusey, though he rambled on for another hour or so, mixing clear recollections with obvious mistakes. One thing was abundantly clear: the longer we talked about Castle, the more his distaste for the man returned to mind and deepened, until at last, when I turned to leave, he asked with genuine concern, “Why do you want to study about a man like this? There were so many good and talented people, even at Universal. James Whale, Al Cosland … why Castle?”
I tried to answer that I found significant qualities in Castle’s work, but Pusey made me feel ashamed to say it.
There was only one more interview of any possible value I went after. Helen Chandler had been immortalized for film fans as Bela Lugosi’s victim-in-chief in Dracula. From there she drifted through a series of undistinguished films, including three of Castle’s. There was no record of her film work, if any, after the late thirties. I was able to trace her to an address in Santa Barbara. She was a soft, refined, and very fragile voice on the phone when I got through to her.
“Max Castle,” she repeated when I mentioned the name. And then there was a long pause. “Oh yes, I worked with him. Twice.”
“Three times actually,” I reminded her. When I requested a visit, her reluctance was obvious.
“I’m not sure it would be worth your trouble. There are many things I wouldn’t feel free to talk about.”
“There are just a few details I’d be interested in. Nothing personal.”
“What sort of details?”
“Oh, some of his directorial techniques, the way he handled his actors.”
“I think that would turn out to be quite personal, especially in my case.”
“I’m willing to let you be as nonpersonal as you wish,” I assured her. “Wouldn’t we be able to stick to technical matters?”
“Max was a most unusual man. He made unusual demands. Frankly, I wouldn’t be able to explain a great deal of what he expected of us. Some of it might sound … quite mad.”
“If I could just have what you remembered most vividly, your major impressions.”
Another long pause. “You see, there were things we were asked not to talk about.”
“By Castle?”
“Yes, by Max. Things he wanted to keep to himself.”
“What sort of things?”
“I suppose I shouldn’t say. Little tricks of the trade he probably didn’t want other directors to know about. There was a great deal about lights … I never understood about that. It was all very unusual.”
“Well, he is dead now. It’s a long while to be keeping secrets.”
“Perhaps you’re right.” But she still hesitated.
“Do you remember some of these things well enough to describe them?”
“Oh yes. One remembers things like that … so far out of the ordinary.”
“If we could talk, that might make it possible for more people to appreciate his work.”
Her tone took on a quizzical chill. “Should I care about that? They were rather frightful pictures … perhaps best forgotten.”
“But don’t you think Castle would want his work to be appreciated?”
“I really have no idea. He seemed to have a very low opinion of the films we worked on. In any case, Max and I … we didn’t part as great friends. He wasn’t a man who made friends. Sometimes I felt … the closer he let you come, the less friendly he became. He could be … very cruel.”
I begged and wheedled a bit longer and finally got an invitation to visit in the following week. Accordingly, I made the drive to Santa Barbara, only to be met at the door by a housekeeper who told me Miss Chandler had been taken ill and was in the hospital. She suggested I leave my name and wait for a call. I waited. Weeks, months. When I finally phoned again, I learned that Miss Chandler was too weak to receive visitors. I wasn’t encouraged to call back. Even so, over the next few years I made two or three routine calls. I was never put through to her. When I finally came across her obituary in the papers, it was too late even to send flowers.
There was very little in what Valentine, Pusey, and Helen Chandler told me that could qualify as fact, let alone anything that contributed to an analysis of Castle’s work. Nevertheless, the biographical tidbits I collected along the way had their value. They sharpened my mental picture of Castle. I saw him now as an even more formidable, if more distasteful, personality: cool, domineering, manipulative. Above all, I was more convinced than ever that he was the guardian of some highly unorthodox filmmaking techniques that remained unknown nearly thirty years after his death. Clare, on the other hand, refused to take the least interest in anything I gleaned from my interviews with Castle’s surviving associates. She regarded my dissertation (she might just as well have called it our dissertation) as an exercise in criticism, not history. Stick to the films, she insisted. Everything else is mere back-lot gossip. But even she couldn’t help being curious about one item of biographical trivia I turned up. Its source lent it dignity.
“Seems Castle was quite a boozer,” I mentioned to her one morning as casually as possible. “At least in his latter days in Hollywood. All-night sessions. Interesting letter I have here from one of his drinking companions.” Clare, seated across the breakfast table, her nose buried in the newspaper, refused to be drawn. “Letter came from Ireland,” I went on. “From a guy who knew Castle at Warners.” No reaction. “Man says he’s just finished filming something called Night of the Iguana. Tennessee Williams play, isn’t that?” She looked up, frowned. “His name is … yes, Huston, that’s it. John Huston. Ever hear of him?”
The newspaper dropped. “John Huston sent you a letter? About Castle?”
He had. A generously long one. It graciously confirmed everything Zip Lipsky had told me about Castle’s tenuous and apparently fateful connection with The Maltese Falcon. Clare snatched the letter from me.
It began with a lengthy apology for the time I’d been kept waiting for a response. Then:
I’m so pleased to know that Max Castle is finally receiving the scholarly attention he deserves. He was a very great director. Had he been given the largesse the studios have lavished on many lesser talents (I include myself) he would surely be remembered today as one of the three or four leading filmmakers of the century. As it was, working on a frayed shoestring, he often achieved results that many of us would be proud to claim as our own.
With respect to The Maltese Falcon: it is true as Zip Lipsky told you that Max and I had many discussions about the movie. If I say I cannot recall them in any detail, you will understand that memory dims across a span of a quarter century. (Lord! is it so long?) I will also confess that many of these conversations transpired in a haze of inebriation that made it somewhat difficult to remember the night before on the morning after. As befalls so many of us in the turbulent and troubled film world, Max had entered an advanced alcoholic phase of life when I knew him. In addition, I must say that a great deal of what Max told me was both bizarre and obscure. Given the intoxicated state in which I audited his often long and rambling disquisitions, I could hardly be expected to retain more than fragments.
As I recollect, Max had an odd fix on The Maltese Falcon. He had the quaint idea that the bird—or rather the statue of the bird—should be the focus of the story. Accordingly, he wanted to surround it with a great deal of fabulous history and iconography that would have made the movie more of a Gothic romance than a hard-boiled detective thriller. For example, I remember that the business of coating the bird with enamel in order to hide its value (a negligible part of the Hammett tale) was very important to Max. He wanted a big scene depicting that. I found all this intriguing but hardly useful. I had already decided quite simply to lift the tale right out of the book chapter by chapter. A cautious approach, but one which seems to have met with critical approval over the years.
Max also had the notion of framing the story within a flashback delivered by Sam Spade on death row the evening before his execution. Max would have deviated from the novel by having Spade kill Gutmann at the prompting of Bridget O’Shaughnessy. He wanted to include this element of the fallen and persecuted hero led to his doom by the wily temptress. All very Arthurian-Wagnerian but hardly what a studio like Warners was likely to buy.
My hunch is that all this had to do with the fact that Max belonged to an unusual religious sect. These of course grow thick on the ground in the permissive cultural climate of southern California; but I was surprised to find that someone of Max’s intellect would have been drawn into what I recall as some form of Rosicrucianism. Though I cannot remember the name of the cult, Max did tell me quite a bit about it in a wandering and haphazard way. More than I wished to know, and possibly more than I was supposed to know. He seemed to take a perverse satisfaction in imparting what I gathered were secret doctrines to me. I recall none of these except those that had to do with outré sexual practices. These stick with me because on one occasion, Max prevailed upon his lovely friend Olga Tell to demonstrate some of them for me. Since the lady is still alive, modesty forbids me to tell you more.
I do hope you won’t find any of this too shocking. You must understand that there was a great deal of this sort of thing happening in the film community in those days. One swami after ananda. My impression is that Max wanted to use his movies as a vehicle for the cult. I’m not certain if he ever succeeded in doing so or how he might have gone about it. I do believe he was trying to persuade me to embed some of the symbols and rites of his sect in The Maltese Falcon—for what reason I cannot say. I’m sure it wouldn’t have contributed to the quality of the film.
My recollection is that Max was really up against it at the time. The studios wouldn’t trust him with anything but low-budget assignments and very few of those. He was understandably bitter and, frankly, desperate. I tried to smuggle him on to the payroll for Falcon, but Warners wouldn’t hear of it. His only contribution to the film—an indirect one—was to put me on to a peculiar team of editors, two German lads whose name eludes me. (Reinhardt? Reingold?) Twins, as I recall. They assisted Tom Richards somewhat in the editing. I believe all that survives of their work is an interesting twist they gave the closing scene—the parallel descent of Spade on the staircase and the elevator behind, a shot I had not intended to use. They found a few odd shadows to work with which Richards and I had unaccountably overlooked. Brief as it is, I have always found that this shot lends a hauntingly bleak tone to the conclusion, though I’m not sure why. I suppose that might count as contributing a few tail feathers on the bird. Otherwise, the movie as we have it is, alas! mine own from first to last.
But in a larger sense, I will gladly concede that the movie is indebted to Max for its bleak and seedy atmospherics. When it comes to film noir, Max was the unsung master. His role in creating the genre is an unwritten chapter in movie history—perhaps now to be supplied by you? (In this regard, I suggest you look closely at his Man into Monster if you can find an uncut print. For my money, it is the best B-movie ever made and the noirest of all noir.)
Best of luck with your study. Do send me a copy upon its completion.
Yours sincerely,
John Huston
P.S. Did Zip Lipsky ever tell you that I asked him to film Falcon for me? Unfortunately, he was not available.
P.P.S. Your letter prompted a rapid excavation of my personal archives. Lo! I discovered a memento of my long-ago evenings with Max Castle. The enclosed renderings are by him. Like myself, he was a trained graphic artist and frequently sketched his settings in detail before the shoot. I learned the technique from him and it has served me well over the years. I can no longer identify which scenes these rather lugubrious drawings were meant to be, but I’m sure you can appreciate that mixing the streets of San Francisco with the dungeons of medieval Europe would have been a grievous error. In better days, Max would surely have realized as much. I present the drawings to you for your scholarly use.
I’d hoped a letter from John Huston might mellow Clare’s opinion of Castle. Huston was one of her idols; if he was willing to call Castle a great director, that ought to make some difference. Not a chance. Clare had staked out her intellectual ground and was prepared to defend it against all comers. Far from moderating her views on Castle, the letter provided grist for her mill.
“A religious cult,” she sneered. “It figures. There’s a twisted mind at work here. Gifted, but twisted. Look at these drawings. How did he expect to work this into The Maltese Falcon? Looks like old Zip was right. Toward the end, the man was off his rocker.”
I had to admit she was right on that point. Two of the three sketches showed what might very well have been dungeons: a vast, lightless interior in which two hirsute artisans were shown toiling by firelight over the statue of a bird, apparently smearing its golden surface with a black coating. In the background, three regally dressed figures looked on. The tunic of one was emblazoned with the emblem Sharkey had first called to my attention: the Maltese cross.
The third sketch had even less obvious relevance to any movie Warner Brothers might have been willing to make. It was a voluptuous female form, naked, suspended in space above three kneeling and prayerful men. There was a large dark bird hovering above her with wings spread. The bird was all that even remotely connected the sketch with The Maltese Falcon. I was pleased to have the drawings. They were well-executed by a deft hand. But all they seemed to provide was evidence of Castle’s increasing instability. I decided, as an act of scholarly mercy, to make no reference to them in my research until I had some clearer way of interpreting what they had to tell me about Castle’s later intellectual development—or degeneration. I wasn’t the Sam Spade to do that yet without a lot more clues.
My dissertation, Max Castle: The Hollywood Years 1925–1941, was a neatly competent job covering my entire collection of Castle films, except for the Judas. I presented a souvenir copy of the bound work to Clare one evening with more ceremonial care than I’d shown my thesis adviser. She brought it to bed that night and, to my surprise, proceeded to read it from cover to cover. I couldn’t see why, since she had worked through the whole volume with me chapter by chapter, page by page. I lay beside her, watching for signs of approval, perhaps even praise that I had given her thoughts the prominence and polish they deserved. Her face remained a mask, at times seeming to darken menacingly. When she finished, she lay the thesis on the bedsheets and slowly smoked her cigarette down to a stub, her eyes staring off distantly. It wasn’t a look I cared to interrupt with questions.
