November 3, 2002

The November 2nd Dia de los Muertes is a celebration held annually in Mexico wherein the population observes the holiday by honoring those who have now passed on. To that end, Box Office Prophets will now pay tribute to some film luminaries who have left this mortal coil since last year's Day of the Dead. By no means intended to be all-inclusive (you would search in vain for people deserving of obeisance such as Rod Steiger, Billy Wilder, John Frankenheimer, Linda Lovelace, Doris Wishman and others), the following is simply a short homage to the lives of some celluloid personalities who deserve remembrance on this special day.

Herman Cohen: This producer and writer was responsible for a number of creature features from the late '50s until the early '70s. Cohen was the man behind the I Was A Teenage Werewolf and Frankenstein films for the classic trash-film outfit American International Pictures. Other career highlights of this giant include the hilarious How to Make a Monster, a King Kong rip-off with the saleable title Konga, as well as the execrable Joan Crawford career-ender Trog.

Kim Hunter: Unlike many of the dearly departed populating this list who came from the fringes of film, initially the career of our present entry was a much more mainstream proposition. Her early career was fairly inauspicious, but when Ms Hunter reprised the role of Stella Kowalski, which she had played on Broadway, in the 1952 film version of Streetcar Named Desire, she was rewarded with a Best Supporting Actress Oscar statuette. This should have been the break she needed to become a true Hollywood star, but unfortunately, her name appearing on a Communist pamphlet shortly after at the height of the Red Scare effectively scuttled that. Still, she hung around long enough to have a fine Hollywood career, although she is likely most famous among viewers today for a role that she played entirely in a primate mask, that of the chimpanzee Zira in the Planet of the Apes films.

James Gregory: It was a bad year for the ape crowd in general, but here the victim was of the gorilla line. As Ursus in Beneath the Planet of the Apes, this actor got to utter the memorable line, "The only GOOD human is a DEAD human", but alas, I guess that line has now come back to bite him. He had a full life and lengthy career at least, as his career included his debut as a cop in Jules Dassin's police drama The Naked City, a role in The Manchurian Candidate, a seemingly drunken performance with Dean Martin in The Silencers, a part in the brutal Elvis Presley vehicle Clambake, a Disney bit in the Dean Jones/Sandy Duncan romp The $1,000,000 Duck and the aforementioned ape outing. This doesn't even touch on some of his other film work, or prolific TV acting on such shows as Colombo, That Girl, Twilight Zone, Hawaii Five-O and many others, though he is probably best known for his long run as Inspector Luger on Barney Miller.

John Agar: Here lies perhaps the greatest B-movie actor of all time. Though he started with the straight stuff - his career kicked off with parts in a couple of great John Ford westerns - by the mid-1950s, it seemed this actor could hardly work anywhere but the monster movie circuit. What followed was an amazing run of low-budget junk, as Agar went on to star in such wondrous spectacles as Revenge of the She Creature, The Mole People, The Brain From Planet Arous, Attack of the Puppet People and Women From the Prehistoric Planet. My personal favorite, however, is Agar's performance in Larry Buchanan's soul-deadening Zontar, the Thing From Venus, which is indelibly etched in my memory from Saturday afternoon Creature Double-Features. There are few people in the history of the movies with the kind of resumé that John Agar put together. He will be missed.

Andre de Toth: An expatriate director from Hungary who came to Hollywood after WWII to direct films and stayed to develop a lengthy career with many highlights. He initially worked with the Korda brothers on movies such as The Thief of Baghdad and Sahara, but eventually moved on to directing his own films in Columbia's B-movie unit. Included in this run were films such as Passport to Suez, None Shall Escape and Ramrod, the latter of which starred de Toth's beautiful blonde wife, Veronica Lake. The director worked regularly through the '50s with a succession of westerns and crime films, as evidenced by the excellent noir Crime Wave starring the criminally-underrated Sterling Hayden. Perhaps de Toth's most famous film was the Vincent Price vehicle House of Wax, one of the first features to be shot in 3-D by a major studio.

Chang Cheh: One of the greatest martial-arts film directors of all time, Cheh might be unfamiliar to many filmgoers, today though his former assistant, John Woo, has become one of the most successful action directors working in Hollywood. Chang's films were mostly made during the '60s and '70s for the Shaw Brothers studio, and with the great news that the some 700+ films that were made for this company will shortly make their way to DVD re-release, perhaps his work is ripe for rediscovery. Known for its masculine (some would say homoerotic) bent and over-the-top violence, Chang's work is often characterized by the juxtaposition of sadism and morality inside the fighting-film structure. Sometimes leaden in their message, Chang's films nevertheless rarely failed to entertain with their combination of fast action, innovative violence, and male-bonding ritual.

Cheryl "Rainbeaux" Smith: This passing just came to our attention at the last minute while finishing up this piece, so we don't have enough time to pay proper tribute to this veteran of horror, cheerleading and women-in-prison films. But we'd be utterly remiss if we completely ignored this actress, who got her showbiz start hanging out at the Rainbow Room during the heyday of the Sunset Strip in the late '60s. Associations made here ultimately led to movie roles in such classic films as Caged Heat, Swinging Cheerleaders, The Pom Pom Girls and Teenage Slumber Party. Unfortunately, Rainbeaux' penchant for riding the white horse would eventually lead to personal troubles, prison stays and a death that came while she was living homeless on the street of LA. A sad and untimely end for a woman who deserved a far better fate.

Dee Dee Ramone: Sure, this one is a bit of a stretch on the movie front, but how could we let the Day of the Dead go by without a nod to our favorite fallen punk rocker? Born Douglas Colvin in 1952, this man was to emerge from Queens, New York as one of the fabulous Ramones, forefathers of punk in the 1970s. Always troubled by his love for smack, it's no surprise that in the end Dee Dee's attraction for Chinese rocks eventually put him in the ground. But at least movie fans will always have a scene or two in Rock 'n' Roll High School to remember him by, though by some accounts the scene from that film where Dee Dee speaks took more retakes than any other, simply because the rocker kept blowing his single line.

Lawrence Tierney: Actor Lawrence Tierney quite often played the tough-guy role in films, from his work playing John Dillinger in 1945, through his near-parody of himself acting in the hilariously awful Tough Guys Don't Dance and the Naked Gun series in the 1980s, to his swan-song appearance in Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs. This hard-ass persona didn't come out of any acting school, though, for this actor was a Brooklyn-born tough who, during the '50s and '60s, strung together a succession of arrests for drunk driving and disorderly conduct. He even managed to get stabbed during a scrum in a Manhattan bar at the age of 54. In his film work, Tierney will be best remembered for the brutal, hard edge that he brought to his typical role as a killer or thug; especially good is the fierce edge he brought to roles in Born to Kill and The Devil Thumbs a Ride.

J. Lee Thompson: A journeyman director whose greatest achievement is generally held to be the harrowing 1962 Cape Fear, this British expatriate was known mostly for the action and adventure films he helmed during a 40-year career. Nine of them starred Charles Bronson, and also included in the run were both Battle for and Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. Busy to the end, Thompson continued to work, as evidenced by his late stint as a boom microphone operator on Ronny Yu's The Bride of Chucky at the ripe old age of 84.

Sidney Pink: This producer and director's biggest claim to fame is that he played a pivotal role in the creation of the first full-length 3-D film, Bwana Devil. He was also instrumental in the creation of a less successful (not that the 3-D experience in any way lived up to its promise) bit of trickery called Cinemagic. This special effect was little more than some pink tinting from the printing process combined with a cracked camera lens, but nonetheless the sci-fi Mars picture Angry Red Planet was shot using this technique. Shortly after the release of this film, angered by the union problems an independent faced in Hollywood, Pink moved his operations to Denmark. There he created the classic dinosaur-run-amok film Reptilicus, as well as Journey to the Seventh Planet, in which more or less the same crew from the dino movie was supplemented with John Agar. Pink eventually moved onto other parts of Europe to produce his films, the results including a spaghetti western with Rory Calhoun (Finger on the Trigger), a little-known early Dustin Hoffman vehicle (Madigan's Millions), and the provocatively titled Man From O.R.G.Y. In more recent years, Pink owned and ran movie theaters in both Puerto Rico and Florida, and it was while living in Pompano Beach that he passed away just a couple weeks ago. A true giant of bad film.

Chuck Jones: The final tribute in this Day of the Dead retrospective goes to a director who created some of the most timeless movies shot during the 20th century. Sure, they were short cartoons, but the myriad animated films that Chuck Jones made for Warner Bros. decades ago are of such high quality that they are still easily found in regular rotation on cable to this day. It was Jones who really cemented the personalities of some of the well-known cast of characters (Bugs, Daffy, et al) that continue to rake in cash for the studio at present. The director was also the man behind How the Grinch Stole Christmas, a half-hour TV show that has become one of the inevitable harbingers of the holiday season. I'm sure most readers will be able to pay tribute to the man by remembering their favorite Jones short; for me, it will forever be Duck Amuck that's my favorite. A more perfect cartoon has never been created.

View other columns by Chris Hyde