Ghost Nursing

Shirley Yim consults a seer in Ghost Nursing

Wilson Tong's Ghost Nursing is the best exploitation film I've seen in some time. The folks at Vinegar Syndrome have issued a splendid looking Blu-ray of this 1982 supernatural horror flick. Shirley Yim stars as Jackie, a working gal who we witness fleeing Hong Kong and some large gambling debts for Thailand in the first reel. There she shares a crash pad with a cousin who cajoles her into selling her wares at a local dive. After being brutalized by a wealthy client, Jackie visits a local seer to gain insight into how she can change her run of bad luck. The seer gifts her a misshapen "child" to nourish who will, in turn, protect Jackie. Things start out promisingly for Jackie, she wins the attention of a hunky and kind suitor, but she does not completely fulfill her part of the bargain and harsh consequences result. 

Ghost Nursing resembles a graphic novel or comic book, as we used to call them, in the best possible way. Visually lurid with bold primary colors, the Vinegar Syndrome disc does justice to the palette of the film. The camera set-ups are outstanding, especially for a film made for such a low budget. The exploitive bits of the film are somewhat undercut by the seamy treatment Jackie experiences. The film editing jumps rapidly through scenes, particularly during the film's gonzo final third. This disguises the brilliantly schlocky practical effects and causes the viewer to get swept up in Ghost Nursing's WTF rush.

Hell's Highway

Tom Brown and Richard Dix

Rowland Brown's Hell's Highway is a vital and nervy B feature from Radio Pictures. This David O. Selznick production beat I Was a Fugitive on the Chain Gang to the punch in the prison exposé sweepstakes of 1932 by opening two months before the more remembered Warner Brothers feature. Hell's Highway stars Richard Dix as an inveterate bank robber facing a lifetime behind bars. He languishes in a shambolic prison camp presided over by a cruel commandant (perpetual baddie C. Henry Gordon). The conditions are medieval in their cruelty as the shackled prisoners break rocks in the hot sun in a penal system built on graft and greed. All the prisoners' wear targets on their backs in a picture that is extremely grungy and deglamorized for a Hollywood flick. Dix's character yearns to break free, but when his kid brother (Tom Brown) joins him in stir, his perspective changes. If you've seen one prison picture you might think you've seen them all, however Hell's Highway wizzes by in 65 minutes of feverish intensity that includes two prison breaks, murder, adultery, intimations of homosexuality, institutional racism, blackmail, torture, and arson.

The film's editing is swift and ironic. A prisoner's drawings spring to animated life. Popular tunes, mostly sung by the black prisoners, serve as aural transitions for this procession of carnage. Sultry blues concerning adultery (Frankie and Johnny) and dope (Willie the Weeper) create an aura of doom. Brown captures the gloomy delirium of the prisoners' plight in sweaty close-ups. The only note of hope in the picture is embodied by Whiteside (Stanley Fields, omnipresent in 1930s Hollywood), a reformer heralding the change coming with the New Deal. William K. Everson has noted how Gordon's character prefigures Hume Cronyn's fascistic prison warden in Brute Force. Similarly, Charles Middleton's mystic convict presages John Steinbeck's defrocked preacher, Jim Casy, in 1939's The Grapes of Wrath. The picture originally had Dix die after being pursued by hound dogs in a swamp, but reshoots directed by John Cromwell give us a slightly less tragic ending. Brown is credited with over twenty screenplays, but his credits as a director are few owing to his alcoholism, communism, and irascibility. Alexander Korda famously fired him on the set of The Scarlet Pimpernel. Nevertheless, on Hell's Highway he creates memorable vignettes with over twenty memorable supporting performers. Dix, who I find oafish in most of his other pictures, is at his brawny best under Brown's direction. 

The Adventures of Hajji Baba

                     

Don Weis' The Adventures of Hajji Baba is a wide screen Technicolor hoot. When I compare it to such tired, socially responsible crap from 1954 as The Country Girl, I further appreciate Weis' buoyancy and colorful flair. The film is exotic schlock, a formula producer Walter Wanger had followed for 1942's Arabian Nights. The Adventures of Hajji Baba, likewise, did boffo biz. Why? The film has a shopworn plot, little characterization, but boasts more flesh on the screen than any other American film of the 1950s. Fifteen minutes had to be shorn from the American cut before it could be shown in the UK. After Weis establishes the film's milieu in one shot, color coordinated slave girls behind bars, he shows Hajji Baba (John Derek) plying one of his trades, which include Don Juan, barber, masseuse, and swordsman, by giving Claude Akins an oily rubdown. I hope Derek got hazard pay. Weis is able to instantly conjure the camaraderie of a community, notwithstanding the fact that he has a cast of very unlikely Arabs, such as the blue eyed Derek.

Establishing a milieu: the first shot of The Adventure of Hajji Baba

Hajji is tasked with protecting a willful princess (Elaine Stewart, as stiff as knotty pine) during a bewildering number of fracases. They both get tied up and tortured numerous times. Hajji makes time with every featured femme in the flick. Despite this and the countless harems we see, the women in this picture all have spunk and agency. In fact, one of the gals Hajji locks lips with is the leader of a rebellious Amazon gang played by flame haired Amanda Blake; soon to be Miss Kitty on television's Gunsmoke. This flick conveys the cheap thrills of pulp and peplum within an eye popping comic book framework. John Derek, villainized as Bo Derek's Svengali, is not bad. I prefer him to Robert Wagner and Jeffrey Hunter. Weis started out promisingly with such trifles as The Affairs of Dobie Gillis, I Love Melvin, and this picture. By the 1960s, he was hopelessly out of step: Billie and The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini are among the worst pictures of any era. Weis' bread and butter became television work: glimpses of a jaunty survivor can be found in episodes of Kolchak: The Night Stalker and Remington Steele.

 

Another factor that helps make The Adventures of Hajji Baba spritely entertainment is its vigorous score by Dimitri Tiomkin. Tiomkin was coming off the huge success of his score for High Noon and its attendant single, Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin. Some thought Frankie Laine's hit version of the ballad saved that film commercially. Consequentially, a single was derived from the main theme of ...Hajji Baba featuring Nat King Cole on vocals with Nelson Riddle arranging. It was never more than a B side, but Cole's mellifluous voice pops up every five minutes of the film burbling "...Hajji Baba." It is bananas, but fits snugly within a film that is already cuckoo for cocoa puffs. Tiomkin's orchestral score is exciting and exotic without depending on Orientalist tropes.