SUMMER OF SATAN: The Devil’s Rain

Following on from ‘The Brotherhood of Satan’, here’s another slice of low-budget 70s small town gothic starring a couple of Peckinpah alumni, this time Ernest Borgnine and Ida Lupino. I’m thinking I might make ‘Race with the Devil’ – featuring Peckinpah alumnus Warren Oates – my next Summer of Satan pick and consider it a trilogy of sorts. The “What I Did in Backwoods America with a Bunch of Satanists When I Wasn’t Making Movies with Sam” Trilogy.

‘The Devil’s Rain’ opens with the elderly Mrs Preston (Lupino) awaiting the return, in a howling storm, of her son Mark (William Shatner). There is a lot of portentous dialogue about the missing patriarch of the household, a book and the diabolical John Corbus (Borgnine), a Satanist who has set up shop in a deserted mining town nearby and who wants the book back. (There is so much blether about the book during the first half of the film, with the reason for its importance not revealed until a good 50 minutes in, that I was wondering why Corbus didn’t just go to a freakin’ library. Or, y’know, join a mail order book club.)

Then things turn nasty at the Preston household, some supernatural business occurs, and Mrs P is kidnapped. This pisses Mark right off and he heads for the mining town intent on confronting Corbus, kicking ass, and getting his dear ol’ ma back.

He finds himself up against more than he bargained for, and an abrupt segue thirty minutes into the proceedings hands over protagonist duties to his brother Tom (Tom Skerritt). Tom is introduced in a scientifically unsound vignette where he and his colleague Dr Sam Richards (Eddie Albert) are conducting an ESP experiment on Tom’s wife Julie (Joan Prather). Julie has a horrifying premonition – one that seems to involve her, in a way that never quite makes sense until the very end of the movie – at the same time that Tom receives news that his ma and his brother are missing.

With local lawman Sheriff Owens (Keenan Wynn) too busy with a recent flood to offer much assistance, Tom picks up the trail and heads off to the mining town. Pretty soon, he discovers that Corbus has as much interest in him as the rest of his family. It’s when he finds out why – and what the importance of the book is – that he is forced into a confrontation with the Satanists.

On the whole, ‘The Devil’s Rain’ is a much better production than ‘The Brotherhood of Satan’. Cinematographer Alex Phillips Jr – who also lensed Peckinpah’s whacked-out black valentine to Mexico, ‘Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia’ – exploits the deserted mining town to magnificently moody effect. Imagine if the red-masked bad dudes in Sergio Corbucci’s ‘Django’ had been card-carrying Lucifer lovers instead of casually racist gunslingers and you’re halfway there.

Robert Fuest’s direction is focused: the film is tight, pacy and decently structured. The face-melting effects have aged somewhat (although you can see where Spielberg got the final sequence of ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ from), but the only bit of FX that’s truly embarrassing is the firecracker transition of Ernest-Borgnine-as-Satanist-in-a-jump-suit to Ernest-Borgnine-in-a-goat-mask.

Where ‘The Devil’s Rain’ really achieves its quota of what-the-fuckery, however, is not in the effects, or the revelation of what the Devil’s Rain actually is, or the incomprehensibility of how the Satanists managed to install a full-scale fucking pipe-organ in the mouth of a cave, but in its casting. The full import is probably diluted by the fact that I’ve scattered the principles’ names parenthetically across three or four paragraphs, so let me line them up next to each other. ‘The Devil’s Rain’, ladies and gentleman, gives you the opportunity to experience Ernest Borgnine, Ida Lupino, Eddie Albert, Keenan Wynn, Tom Skerritt and The Shat in the same movie. Oh yeah, and if you scrutinize the ranks of the Satanists carefully, you’ll see a young John Travolta floating around in the background.

Effective little chiller it may be, but there are plenty of instances where ‘The Devil’s Rain’ verges on camp. The sight, just minutes in, of Lupino wringing her hands and projecting wide-eyed sincerity and trying to pretend that she’s not in a B-movie horror outing while The Shat gives it the thousand yard stare to a point just off camera (I began to suspect that he was locked in a stare-it-out contest with the dude holding the boom) while DELIVERING all-his-dialogue IN A MANNER that-randomly-alternates … between … STENTORIAN ENUNCIATION and rat-a-tat-speed … with … more … pregnant pauses … than … a … Harold Pinter play. But. At. The. Wrong. Moments. I can only assume that when the man read a script, his brain automatically Tippexed out all the punctuation and he paused and stopped and raised his voiced and then spokerealfast at what he thought were the right moments. (They weren’t.)

Mark’s verbal stand-off with Corbus is hilarious, The Shat pulling out a frown/pointy figure combo as it a stiff talking to is all it takes for a 300-year-old devil worshipper to repent his ways and ask forgiveness. It says something that, in this scene, that Borgnine (an inveterate scenery chewer except when he had the guidance of a director of Peckinpah’s stature) comes off as understated!

Robert Fuest spent much of his career in TV (in particular directing some cracking episodes of ‘The Avengers’), but the handful of feature films he helmed make it lamentable that his talent wasn’t deployed on the big screen more often. ‘The Abominable Dr Phibes’ and its sequel are genre favourites, ‘And Soon the Darkness’ is a slow-burn exercise in Hitchcockian suspense, and his adaptation of ‘Wuthering Heights’ with Anna Calder-Marshall and Timothy Dalton captures the viciousness of Cathy and Heathcliffe’s turbulent romance better than any other version.

In ‘The Devil’s Rain’, Fuest conflates the horror film and the western, without sacrificing or bastardizing the imagery of either. He pitches the old guard against young turks. He creates atmosphere (the storm that batters the Prestons’ homestead in the opening scene; the dusty avenues of the abandoned town; the out-of-place church and its unholy interior) on a nothing budget. Sure, some of it’s wonky (the very last shot, while brutally effective as a closer, actually doesn’t make sense once you think about it for longer than, say, 30 seconds) and it was never going to be anything more than a B-movie, but it’s a pisser to note that ‘The Devil’s Rain’ was his last big screen outing.

High Sierra

Roy Earle (Humphrey Bogart) is released from prison after eight years, his pardon bought and paid for by ailing mob boss “Big” Mac (Donald MacBride) – perhaps the only eminence grice in American crime cinema who shares a name with a hamburger – and given instructions to make contact with his new partners Red (Arthur Kennedy) and the curiously named Babe (Alan Curtis). Along with inside man Mendoza (Cornel Wilde), this is the crew “Big” Mac has lined up for a casino robbery.

Roy finds them holed up in a cabin at an out-of-season resort, bickering over dance hall girl Marie (Ida Lupino). He is immediately distrustful of their callow behaviour and lack of professionalism (thus establishing jitterbugging loudmouths as the 1940s equivalent of shell-suited chavs), nor is he enamoured of Marie’s clingy attachment to him. Things are complicated when he helps out disenfranchised farmer Pa (Henry Travers), en route to L.A. to lodge with family after the repossession of his farm, and finds himself sympathetic to – and then falling for – the old man’s granddaughter, the club-footed Velma (Joan Leslie).

Nicknamed “Mad Dog” by the press, particularly after the heist goes south and fatalities ensue, Roy Earle is both hard as nails and a man of honour. He stands no nonsense from Red and Babe, but by his own admission is soft-hearted towards Marie and the mongrel who befriends them. He remains loyal to “Big” Mac even as the treacherous Healy (Jerome Cowan) tries to depose him on his deathbed. He’s a friend to Pa, who recognises him as an old-school on-the-level type. He foots the bill (pardon the pun) for Velma’s surgery, even though she spurns him for an oily insurance salesman with a pencil moustache and a nasty suit.

Adapted from W.R. Burnett’s novel by John Huston and Burnett himself (Burnett’s novels include ‘Little Caesar’, ‘Dark Hazard’ and ‘The Asphalt Jungle’, all filmed) and directed by Raoul Walsh, ‘High Sierra’ marked Bogart’s move from memorable supporting roles (‘Angels with Dirty Faces’, ‘The Roaring Twenties’) to bona fide leading man status. Released in 1941, Bogart went on to star in ‘The Maltese Falcon’, ‘Casablanca’, ‘Sahara’, ‘To Have and Have Not’ and ‘The Big Sleep’ in the next five years alone.

In many respects, ‘High Sierra’ – never mind its gangster trappings – is pure melodrama. The crippled heroine who turns into a vituperative good-time girl the moment her club-foot is cured. The good-time girl who turns out to have a heart of gold. The hideously stereotyped comic relief black character. The heist that turns ugly. The yellow-belly who squeals. The wound that slows our hero down. The net that closes in on him. The sentimental commitment to a woman and a dog that proves his undoing. And our hero himself, the career criminal with a code of honour that suddenly doesn’t seem to count for much.

And this is what makes ‘High Sierra’ a classic, flawed and clichéd as it is in more than one respect. Roy Earle is a man who has outlived his times. Time has passed him by in jail. When he’s released in the opening scene, he immediately goes to a park; later, he accepts the fact that he’s been pardoned on Mac’s coin and is in his pocket. It’s not difficult to see the beginnings of Doc McCoy three decades later in ‘The Getaway’. Roy’s old-time ways find vicious contrast with the juvenility of Red and Babe, not unlike Thornton’s enforced association with T.C. and Coffer in ‘The Wild Bunch’. Roy’s final stand is measured against the timeless grandeur of the mountains, like Steve Judd’s in ‘Ride the High Country’. Roy Earle is the prototype Sam Peckinpah hero. “Times sure have changed,” Mac observes at one point, to which Roy responds, “Yeah … sometimes I feel like I don’t know what it’s all about anymore.” Right there, my friends: right there.

In a moment heavy with foreshadowing, Doc Banton tells Roy: “Remember what Johnny Dillinger said about guys like you and him? He said you're just rushing toward death. That’s it – you’re rushing towards death.” In movies like ‘High Sierra’ and ‘White Heat’, Raoul Walsh began to tap into an aesthetic that Peckinpah would render as visceral cinematic poetry.

Junior Bonner

"Some kinda motel cowboy."

Background

Peckinpah went straight from 'Straw Dogs' to 'Junior Bonner', marking the first and only time in his career he directed two films in the same year. Steve McQueen was already attached to star. The shoot was untroubled and Peckinpah's drinking - which had precipitated his hospitalisation during 'Straw Dogs' - was under control for the duration of the production. Although Peckinpah only went a day overschedule, he exceeded the $2.5 million budget by an extra $1 million. Ignorning both Peckinpah and McQueen's assertion that the film should open small, generate reviews and word of mouth and gradually find its audience, the studio gave it the kind of "opening weekend" release better suited to one of McQueen's action pictures. Despite some very good notices, it flopped. Nonetheless, the relationship between Peckinpah and McQueen remained strong and it was on the basis of 'Junior Bonner' that the actor offered Peckinpah directorial duties on 'The Getaway'.

Synopsis

Rodeo cowboy Junior Bonner (Steve McQueen) nurses a grudge and hell of a lot of bruises from an encounter with a Brahma bull of intemperate disposition named Sunshine. Returning to his home town of Prescott for a return engagement with said bovine, Junior is just in time to witness the house he grew up in demolished by bulldozers to make way for a new real estate development. The realtor: Junior's corpulent and money-obsessed brother Curly (Joe Don Baker). Curly tries to inveigle Junior into acting as a spokesman for his business, taunting him about how little he makes on the rodeo circuit. Junior also discovers Curly's condescending treatment of their father Ace (Robert Preston), struggles to reconcile his affection for the old man with his awkward and stilted relationship with his pragmatic mother (Ida Lupino), and ignores the taunts of his rodeo rival Red Terwilliger (Bill McKinney). There's a few things on Junior's mind, then, as the rodeo gets underway, a carnival atmosphere grips Prescott and Ace tries to talk Junior around to his latest hare-brained scheme: a new life on a ranch in Australia.

Analysis

It was usually the case that Peckinpah responded to screenplays for their potential; he would then develop that potential, often by laborious re-writing or re-imagining. Often Peckinpah is credited as co-author and even in the cases of 'Ride the High Country' and 'The Ballad of Cable Hogue', where the original writers retain full credit, Peckinpah rewrote entire sections of dialogue, infusing these films with saddle-creased poetry. With Rosebrook's screenplay for 'Junior Bonner', however, nothing needed to be done. Peckinpah signed to direct after reading it once: it was a jewel of a script, in tune with the key themes and concerns that define Peckinpah’s work.

We have a hero schooled in the old way of doing things who resents the changing times: Junior's life is the road and the rodeo, he’s more at home outdoors or on horseback than anywhere else, he has a frontiersman’s tough but laconic attitude, and he balks at his brother’s entrepreneurial mindset. Same goes for Ace: he's a drifter and a dreamer, a man whose natural habitants are the saddle and barstool, and he has arguably less place in the modern world than his son.

We have technology as a destructive force: large machines destroy a homestead to make way for a land/property deal driven by a businessman's greed for profits – a nakedly Peckinpahesque subtext that, as we shall see, recurs explicitly in 'Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid'. When Junior sees the bulldozers ramming through the walls of his childhood home, Peckinpah intercuts the scene with shots of the house while it was still standing and close ups of its interior, harshly contrasting the warm, homely details (including, poignantly, a yellowing newspaper cutting about one of Junior's earlier rodeo successes) with scenes of impersonal destruction. Junior drives over, but he's prevented from getting any closer by a 'dozer driver who threatens to dump a load of gravel into Junior's open-top car if he doesn't back up and depart.

This is where the aesthetic of 'Junior Bonner' differs from any other Peckinpah film: where Steve Judd or Gil Westrum, Pike Bishop or Dutch Engstrom, Pat Garrett or Billy - hell, even Cable Hogue - would have filled their hand at that point and done something about it, Junior just sticks it in reverse, goes on his way and has to live with it.

There isn't a single shot fired in 'Junior Bonner', which makes it unique in Peckinpah's filmography. Even 'The Ballad of Cable Hogue' - which is essentially about love and redemption - has its hero blow a couple of recidivists away. It is completely non-violent: a bar-room brawl that breaks out towards the end is played for laughs, while the inevitable dust-up between Junior and Curly consists of exactly two punches being thrown. Junior hits Curly. Half an hour passes. Curly hits him back. End of.

Nor is the rivalry between Junior and Terwilliger in the same league as the compromised relationships between Pike Bishop and Deke Thornton or Pat and Billy. Indeed, Junior's chatting up of Red's girlfriend (apropos of which the brawl erupts; ironically, Junior ducks any involvement and uses the melee to cover his absconsion with the girl) is the only real dramatic development that this subplot engenders.

It never ceases to amaze me just how genial, laconic and unhurried 'Junior Bonner' is. But for the excitingly shot and edited rodeo sequences (DoP: the incomparable Lucien Ballad; editors: Frank Santillo and Robert Wolfe) and the colourful pangeant scenes, there would be no pace to the film at all. And yet it's as watchable and engaged as anything Peckinpah did. Why? Because the man was an actor's director and for an actor's director the character study is as dynamic and dramatic a thing to direct as the most full-on, visceral, cathartic scene. McQueen, who took the role in an attempt to move away from the action hero roles that define his screen persona, achieves in 'Junior Bonner' an acting style as minimalist and unfussy as that of Clint Eastwood. It's such a different side to McQueen and so refreshing to watch.

The rest of the cast do stellar work: Robert Preston is rogueish and irrepressible as Ace; he gives a performance that outshines anything else on his CV. Ida Lupino, no stranger to giving beautifully nuanced performances, brings a spiky vulnerability. Her scenes with Preston zing with acerbic wit. Peckinpah Irregulars Ben Johnson and Dub Taylor make every second of their supporting roles count. And Joe Don Baker, a scene-stealer in everything from 'Charley Varrick' to a couple of the Brosnan Bond movies, justifies every scene he steals by fleshing out Curly and making him more than just the profit-obsessed villain-by-default businessman. When he asks Junior to work for him, he makes no bones about being able to exploit his rodeo reputation to generate business ("big cowboy like you, sincere, genuine as a sunrise"); and yet the offer's motivated by a genuine desire to see Junior better himself, even if Curly's way of expressing it is misguided. "I'm working on my first million," he tells his brother. "You're still working on eight seconds."

It's Junior who gets there first, though. And what he does with the prize-money provides the most affirmative finale in Peckinpah's ouevre.