Weirdhouse Cinema: Night Tide

In this episode of Weirdhouse Cinema, Rob and Joe discuss the 1961 Curtis Harrington beatnik folk horror film “Night Tide,” starring Dennis Hopper and Linda Lawson.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey you welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb.

Speaker 3 (00:16):
And this is Joe McCormick. And today on Weird House Cinema,
we're going to be talking about the nineteen sixty one
horror fantasy romance Night Tide, written and directed by Curtis Harrington,
starring Dennis Hopper and Linda Lawson. So this movie had
been on my list for a while. I think I

(00:36):
added it to the list after we talked about Curtis
Harrington in our episode on Queen of Blood, a later
movie by Herrington from nineteen sixty six. If you don't
remember that episode, Queen of Blood was the Roger Corman
financed sci fi horror movie in which a bunch of
astronauts rescue an alien emissary who is shipwrecked on the

(00:59):
mark shin moon Phobos. But then while they're on the
way back to Earth, it turns out, uh oh, she's
a vampire and she wants to drink all their blood.
One of the members of the crew in that movie,
not the main member of the crew, kind of a
secondary character, is played by Dennis Hopper, which is gonna
be a funny connection to this movie.

Speaker 2 (01:16):
Yeah, I believe John Saxon might have been the lead
in that one, and Basil Rathbone was in it as well.

Speaker 3 (01:21):
Basil Rathbone playing one of those stay in one room
and read some lines. But yeah, John Saxon is on
the spaceship. I think Dennis Hopper gets his blood drank.
And yeah, but Queen of Blood was notable for being
like half original footage and half footage from a couple
of pre existing Soviet Soviet science fiction movies, mostly like

(01:43):
special effects shots from these movies had been bought And
then I think Roger Korman's like, you know, let's we
already owned the rights to this, let's make another movie
out of it.

Speaker 2 (01:54):
Yeah, but in the end, far better film than it
had any right to be given those constraints.

Speaker 3 (01:59):
Yes, and I think it helps that those special effects
shot shots that they bought in actually do look very good,
like very artful, you know, kind of beautiful, pleasing special
effects shots. But anyway, the funny thing about that is,
according to Curtis Harrington, Corman offered to put up the
financing for Queen of Blood because he was impressed with

(02:21):
Night Tide, the movie that we're going to be talking
about today. Night Tide had been Harrington's first feature film,
so especially once we start talking about this movie, it's
gonna be really funny to think about, like this kind
of quiet, subtle art film leading to the opportunities including
Queen of Blood. So what kind of movie is Night Tide?

(02:44):
A lot of reviewers have had trouble placing it in
a genre. The main thrust of the story is a
romance between the characters played by Dennis Hopper and Linda Lawson,
but this movie also has elements of horror, element of thriller,
definitely of fantasy and mystery. Personally, I would say that

(03:06):
it's an eerie, supernatural romance, but of course you've got
these these parts that feel like film noir, parts that
feel like full corror. I'd say, yeah. Sometimes you could
just say it's an art house film. I think that's
fair because it's got these scenes that have dangling images
from out of a dream. It's very popular in that
mid century, you know, art film genre. I'm thinking of

(03:29):
the empty rocking chair and the wind and things like that,
and then other parts of this movie just feel like
beach blanket bingo. You know, there's kind of a beach
party atmosphere to the happier romance scenes that I like.
I like the contrast there when things get really spooky
and Linda Lawson starts talking about hearing the moon talking
to her, but they've like just been talking about putting

(03:51):
the suntan lotion on. And then also, it's sort of
like a beat coffee house movie, especially in a few
scenes early on. And it's a cycle logical murder thriller,
like a Hitchcock movie. So there's just a whole lot
going on.

Speaker 2 (04:04):
Yeah, yeah, number of Once you list them out, it
sounds like this is going to be they're going to
be experiencing whiplash, but everything proceeds at a pace and
at a rate that feels very natural.

Speaker 3 (04:16):
Yeah, totally. So I'll go ahead and do a quick
synopsis to orient Us at Night. Tide is the story
of a young Navy recruit named Johnny who falls in
love with a woman named Mora who works on the
Santa Monica peer in California playing a mermaid at a
carnival attraction, and at first they have a blissful romance,

(04:37):
but things start to become strange when Johnny notices that
Mora is being followed everywhere by an older woman with
a witch like presence who speaks to her in a
foreign language. And Mora seems haunted by the moon and
feels the effects of the tide on her body and
dreams that the ocean is calling to her. And then

(04:59):
on on top of all this, Johnny starts to hear
rumors about Mora's last two boyfriends, who both died under
weird circumstances. So a mystery comes into focus, and the
question is does Mora have a secret or could maybe
she and Johnny both be casualties of some kind of
conspiracy by the sea. So I will note that in

(05:21):
this episode, as usual, we're going to be talking about
the ending of the film, and this movie definitely has
some big surprises in it, So if you want to
hop out go watch the movie before we ruin any
of the plot surprises, you should probably go for that.

Speaker 2 (05:33):
Now, Yeah, I'll go ahead and mention where you can
find it. Then there's a really nice indicator Blu ray
edition of the film if you're going for physical media,
and this features a four K restoration and a special
treat that this makes me wish I had watched it
in this format. A nineteen ninety eight audio commentary that
features both director Curtis Harrington and starre Dennis Hopper. I

(05:55):
believe there was. Yeah, Yeah, it's supposed to be really good.
A lot of them are just just talking about the
making of the film and pointing out all sorts of little,
little curious facts about what you're seeing. But I believe yeah,
And I believe there was also a Quino Lurber release
as well. You can also find this one on digital
easy to find in that format. I will point out, however,

(06:17):
I rented it digitally, and only after i'd already you know,
made the purchase for the rental, that I realized it
was colorized. And as I've mentioned before, I'm not one
hundred opposed to colorized versions of films. With certain films,
it can. It can kind of work, you know, your
sort of sci fi films. Sometimes I don't universally hate it,
but Nighttide demands to be seen in its original black

(06:39):
and white. I ended up having to figure out how
to set my smart TV to grayscale, which is not easy.
Back in the old days, it was just a knob,
you know, and your old televisions. Nowadays you have to
go into a whole bunch of sub menus. But once
I converted it to gray scale, I was able to
watch it h and you know, I believe as it
was intended. But you don't want to have to go

(07:01):
through all that. Get it in black and white if
you can, Otherwise you're gonna have to do a workaround.

Speaker 3 (07:05):
I would recommend watching it in black and white. I
don't want to ruin your enjoyment for the movies where
you like it. But I'm generally not a fan of colorization.
I would say, specially in this case, I would not
recommend that.

Speaker 2 (07:17):
I'm trying to think there was some film we watched
for Weird House and I ended up not minding it,
but I can't remember. It's probably more of an exception
to the rule than anything.

Speaker 3 (07:27):
Yeah, might as well note here that the title of
the movie Night Tide is a quote from the poem
Annabel Lee by Edgar Allan Poe. This is a poem
about the death of a woman beloved by the poet,
which takes place in a kingdom by the sea, so
you can see the relevance to this story. But the
last stanza of annabel Lee goes as follows, for the

(07:51):
moon never beams without bringing me dreams of beautiful annabel Lee,
and the stars never rise. But I feel the bright
eyes of the beautiful Annabelle Lee. And so all the
night Tide, I lie down by the side of my darling,
my darling, my life, and my bride in her sepulcher,
there by the sea, in her tomb, by the sounding sea.

Speaker 2 (08:14):
Very nice, very nice. There's the title right there. Now.

Speaker 3 (08:17):
I just had the thought, as a literary illusion, does
that give away too much about the ending of the movie?
What's your feeling about that? Rob? Should you make allusions
to other works of literature if they have the same
ending as the story that you're going to tell?

Speaker 2 (08:32):
Sure? Why not? Because the audience never knows if you're
going to stick to it or subvert it, So why not?

Speaker 3 (08:39):
I guess you're right. And it's probably obscure enough a
reference to Annibal Lee that probably nobody's going like, oh,
night Tide, that's that agg Allan Poe poem. You know,
it's like two words, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (08:50):
Now a note about expectations here. Nighttide is not a
monster movie, and I think some folks have had maybe
disappointment with this based on some online reviews, were looking
at where people went into it, maybe wanting something a
little camp here, a little more B movie, you know,
And Yeah, it's just not the case, as we've been saying.

(09:11):
Think of it more of it as an avant garde
noir contemplation on loneliness and desire. Likewise, we should point
out that the homo erotic and gay subtext is something
that the folks have often noted about this film, and
that too is also subtle and doesn't tackle anything directly
or overtly, but very much a part of the sort

(09:33):
of like commentary world of this film thing. A lot
of has been written about this, as we'll discuss. Curtis
Harrington was himself an openly gay director, and in this
film is noted for some of that subtext. And given
that we're here at the tail end of Pride Month,
seemed like a perfect time to dive into another one
of his films.

Speaker 3 (09:53):
Yeah. I think that the gay subtext that is often
read into this movie is really interesting because I see
it applied not just to one character like I think
sometimes critics talk about elements of disappearing with reference to
the protagonist Johnny you know, played by Dennis Hopper, but
also applied to the character Mora played by Linda Lawson,

(10:16):
for example, questions about whether to some extent is the
question of her belonging to the people of the Sea,
having this kind of like unconfirmed or secret relationship with
the Sirens or the mermaids, the people of the Sea,
having something to do with like being in the closet
or being being sort of having an identity that like

(10:38):
can't be fully realized among the people you walk about
to day to day.

Speaker 2 (10:43):
Absolutely, Yeah, like what happens to that, to her nature,
to her identity here in this world where she can't
be who and what she is. So it's gonna be
it's gonna be fun to talk about these aspects of
the film. Yeah, some quick stats. This is, of course,
is our second Harrington film, and it's going to be
our fourth film to feature Dennis Hopper, following episodes on

(11:05):
ninety three Super Mario Brothers, Queen of Blood and Head.

Speaker 3 (11:09):
Oh, Dennis Hopper had something to do with Head totally.

Speaker 2 (11:12):
He was in the I wasn't on that episode, but
he's in the credits. He at least pops up somewhere
in there.

Speaker 3 (11:17):
Okay, I forget what he had to do with head,
but that makes sense, you know, the sixties freak out guy.
Though this is a very pre sixties freak out Dennis
Hopper we're going to get in this movie. I want
to talk about that extensively when we get into him
in the connection section. But this is not your average
Dennis Hopper.

Speaker 2 (11:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (11:37):
You know, when I think Dennis Hopper, I think Super
Mario Brothers, Dennis Hopper, King Koopa guy.

Speaker 2 (11:43):
Yeah. People often think about that. They think about Blue Velvet,
they think about Speed or water World or I mean,
I think another major touchstone that's earlier than all of
those examples is of course Apocalypse. Now, yeah, where he
plays the photojournalist. I'm an American, that character totally. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (12:00):
Well, we'll talk about that in a bit.

Speaker 2 (12:10):
All right, Well, let's get into the folks behind this film.
We'll talk a little bit more. First of all about
Curtis Harrington, the director, the writer. He lived nineteen twenty
six through two thousand and seven. Harrington was obviously a
big Edgar Allan Poe fan, so it's fitting that his
first film was a nineteen forty two short based on

(12:30):
the Fall of the House of Usher. It was the
first of a string of short films that also included
fifty six Is the Wormwood Star, and then Nighttide was
his first feature film independently produced with at least some
amount of help and connection making from Roger Korman. As such,
he followed it up with a Roger Corman produced though

(12:52):
uncredited in that regard film sixty five, Voyage to the
Prehistoric Planet, followed by Queen of Blood. I haven't seen
Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet, so I can't comment on
that one.

Speaker 3 (13:03):
Yeah, me neither, don't know anything about it, but it
seems fitting with this string of movies that Harrington started
doing after Night Tide in the sixties, where he's essentially
trying to get a more mainstream movie making career. He's
breaking out of the art house film world, which he
occupied in the fifties and still somewhat you could say

(13:26):
somewhat occupied in the era of Night Tide. Night Tide
is kind of a bridge he's making, sort of still
an art movie, but it has some mainstream narrative appeal,
and then eventually he's going to break through into just
like I'm doing science fiction movies. I'm making money in
the industry.

Speaker 2 (13:41):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, So it's going to be be interesting
to compare him to him to some other contemporary figures.
We'll get into it in a bed here. But after Night
Tide he shot sixty seven's Games, a thriller with James Kahn,
then the nineteen seventy film How Awful About Alan starring
Anthony Perkins. Seventy one's What's the Matter with Helen? That's

(14:02):
with Debbie Reynolds and Shelley Winters. Seventy two's Whoever Slew
Anti Rue? That's with Shelley Winters, Sir Ralph Richardson, and
Michael Gothard is in that as well. I can't I
haven't seen it, so I can't tell you if he's
wearing cool sunglasses in that, but I assume that he is,
or glasses some sort of cool eye wear. Seems to
frequently come with a Gothard performance.

Speaker 3 (14:24):
What was the name of the Michael Gothard movie we
did on the show?

Speaker 2 (14:27):
Oh it was Scream Screen again? Yes, yeah, ok, yeah, yeah,
And there may have been another one he popped up
in as well, but memorable screen presence for sure. Let's
see Harrington also directed seventy three's The Killing Kind with
the Sue Bernard, a faster Pussycat, Kill Kill. He also
did the seventy three TV movie The Cat Creature, the

(14:48):
seventy four TV movie Killer Bees, the seventy five TV
movie The Dead Don't Die with George Hamilton, seventy seven's
Ruby with Piper Laurie, the seventy eight TV movie Devil
Dog the Hound of Well, that's with the Richard Krenna,
and also Martin Beswick, who was in another movie we
were considering for this week, and that movie is not

(15:09):
this movie, Devil Dog the Hound of Hell. Not to
be confused with Zoltan Hound of Dracula, different, different evil
dog movie.

Speaker 3 (15:18):
Is that the same as the movie Dracula's Dog or
a different.

Speaker 2 (15:21):
Movie that is Dracula's Dog? Yes, okay, okay. For folks
who thought that Zoltan Hound of Dracula was too confusing,
they're like, what are we talking about here? No, it's
Dracula's Dog. And then Harrington's final full length film was
Mattahari in nineteen eighty five, starring Sylvia Crystal of Emmanuel fame,
and he continued to work as a director on various
TV shows, including the likes of Logan's Run, Charlie's Angels,

(15:45):
Wonder Woman, Dark Room Dynasty in one episode of the
eighty seven Twilight Zone revival Cool. So, Night Tide is
often referenced as Harrington's best and this is one of
the one of the main reasons we've moved on to
this after or Queen of Blood. We're like, we're impressed
with what we've seen from this guy in a film
where he was working with various constraints. What is it

(16:07):
like when he not to say he had just complete
free reign here, but you know, it's an independently produced picture.
He had a great deal of creative freedom here. You know,
what's it like when he puts that together? So Night
Tide is often considered one of his best, alongside seventy
one's What's the Matter with Helen? To understand that one's
highly regarded as well. But yeah, Night Tide especially manages

(16:30):
to exist with a foot in kind of two different worlds,
So the realm of avant garde experimentation and the world
of commercial genre work, and it mix for a very
interesting film. Again, not a campy monster film, but it's
effectively creepy. It's you know, it would say, low key
beautiful in many scenes, some very surreal shots, some dreamlike qualities,

(16:53):
great use of supernatural elements, and much of the film
strength is in its more I think ethereal contemplation of
loneliness and desire.

Speaker 3 (17:03):
Yeah, the movie is very subtle. I want to look
into some of these subtle touches and characterization when we
get into the plot section, especially just in the first
few minutes of the movie. But there's a lot of
feeling in it, and it does still have I think,
some of an art house sensibility, though I wouldn't stress

(17:24):
that too much because that might give you the idea
that it's, you know, more like these these other art
house films of the mid century that Harrington, by the way,
was associated with, people like Maya Darren and Kenneth Anger,
who made you might say, more symbolic films or films
that were less narratively coherent and instead were you know,

(17:46):
sequences of images or kind of strange abstract contemplations on
a theme. Harrington also did movies like that before he
had his breakout, you might say, with Night Tide. He
was mainly thought of as an art filmmaker, and he
made artistic short films like some of these other contemporaries

(18:06):
like Kenneth Anger, but yeah, he broke through, and he's
often considered one of the few, or maybe the only
one of these mid century California art directors who made
the switch into mainstream cinema. The others didn't.

Speaker 2 (18:24):
Really Yeah, yeah, yeah. Kenneth Anger, I think is the
really interesting figure to compare him to, because Anger never
left the indie scene, like he stayed in short indie
experimentation for the duration of his career, whereas, again, Harrington
successfully makes this transference into the commercial world and then

(18:49):
brings aspects of what made him special in the experimental
world with him.

Speaker 3 (18:54):
And in Harrington's work, I feel like you can really
see both sensibilities, like there is there is definitely something that,
to me at least, always is still artistic about him,
like he's somebody who is at some level trying to
create art. But you can also see that he appreciates
camp and he has a love of the old Hollywood style,

(19:17):
like one thing about Night Tide A lot of people
have noted, and I think Harrington himself admitted to this.
He agreed that the movie was very influenced by a
previous Hollywood film, the nineteen forty two movie Cat People,
which I think we're going to have to do on
the show someday.

Speaker 2 (19:33):
It keeps coming out.

Speaker 3 (19:34):
We just never did an episode on it. But that
was Val Luton, produced, directed by Oh, I don't know
how you actually pronounce his name, Jacques Turner Tournaire his
French name. But that movie is also a romance about
a romance between a man and a woman in which
the woman may have a bizarre, supernatural secret. But you

(19:56):
can also apply a psychological framing to the plot. You
can kind of read it in the supernatural way or
in the psychological way, which is very much how Night
Tide is positioned as well. In general, I think for Harrington,
a major theme of his career was the constant struggle
and tension between artistic ambitions and a desire to maintain

(20:19):
a sort of artistic integrity, setting that against the practical
necessities of filmmaking and the you know, the desires of
people who were financing films like he's. I think he
framed his own life story very much in terms of
this constant difficult compromise between like what he felt he

(20:40):
had to do as a filmmaker and what he wanted
to do as an artist. But also you could get
the idea from that that he's somebody who's, you know,
very self serious about his work. And I don't think
that's entirely true either, because I was reading some excerpts
from a book that he wrote about his career called
Guys Don't Work in Hollywood. The excerpts I read are

(21:03):
fantastically He's a good writer, like good snappy pros, very funny, droll,
dry sense of humor, and he clearly he just has
a good sense of irony about Hollywood and about you know,
the people that he works with and what's going on.
There's one story that he tells in the book, again
clearly with a strong sense of irony, about how he

(21:24):
is invited to a dinner being given in honor of Truman,
Capote and Trum. He says Truman Capote comes up to
him and says, oh, I loved Night Tide. You know,
so he's about the movie we're talking about today. Capoti
was a fan. But he gets seated at this dinner
next to some actress. I actually can't remember her name,
but an actress who he becomes aware is a fan

(21:48):
of like religiously based book movie censoring crusades, you know,
against immorality and film, and so he's just kind of
trying to wind her up. He's like, oh, really, you know,
tell me about all the immorality and film. And apparently
she was like, can you believe this filth they're making?
Like Lawrence of Arabia. Apparently she was incensed because she

(22:09):
believed T. E. Lawrence was gay and thought, how could
you make a film about such a person?

Speaker 2 (22:14):
Yeah, one of the one of the classic films of
all time.

Speaker 1 (22:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (22:16):
Yeah. But anyway, the book seems like, I don't know,
I would really like to read this book. Harrington seems
like an interesting guy, not just somebody whose work was interesting,
but he had interesting perspective about it and about the
industry that he worked in. So I'm going to come
back and try to read that book.

Speaker 2 (22:36):
At some point. Now. One of the things as well,
that Harrington has often given credit for is that he
recognized in Dennis Hopper and already you know, very very
you know, seasoned performer you been working for a number
of years, realized this is a guy whose performance you
could build a movie around. Yeah, and indeed this is
a lead Yeah, this could be this is a lead

(22:56):
actor right here. Let's use him like that, because this is,
in fact, Dennis Hopper's first starring role plays Johnny Drake.
We've talked about Hopper before, he of course lived nineteen
thirty six through twenty ten. And since we've discussed Hopper before,
you know, mostly want to situate him within his career
in filmography here and again talking about like the Dennis

(23:17):
Hopper we see in this movie versus performances from Dennis
Hopper that may more instantly come to mind for you know,
folks looking back on the totality of his career. So
Hopper's credits go back to TV roles in the mid fifties.
He also had some early, minor and sometimes uncredited film
roles in the likes of fifty five's Rebel without a Cause.

(23:39):
He just plays like a random goon in that. I've
actually never watched Rebel without a Cause, and I certainly
haven't watched it looking for Dennis Hopper, but he's in
there somewhere. He's also when I Died a Thousand times.
He's in Giant in fifty six and various other films,
including Key Witness in nineteen sixty that was his credit

(24:01):
right before Nighttide, but again no lead roles until this film. Afterwards,
he did a great deal more TV work. He played
Tarzan in a nineteen sixty four Andy Warhol movie. He
was in the Sons of Katie Elder in sixty five,
Queen of Blood in sixty six, and then in sixty
seven he appeared in the Roger Corman directed and Jack
Nicholson scripted LSD film The Trip, as well as Cool

(24:24):
Hand Luke. And this is around the time that we
generally began to leave behind the scrappy young Dennis Hopper
and began to deal with the sort of counter culture
Dennis Hopper. And this is a period of some great
career high points, but also the beginnings of generally what's
considered multiple substance struggles that would plague Hopper until he

(24:46):
finally became sober and I believe nineteen eighty five, enabling
a career comeback that saw him appear in such films
as Hoosiers, which he received an OSCAR nomination for Blue Velvet,
as well as films like Texas Chainsaw Massacre too. I mean,
these are all films that came together, you know, because
he was able to really you know, jump back in

(25:07):
and and and see his career take back off again.

Speaker 3 (25:12):
I Mean, I like a lot of Dennis Hopper rolls,
but I got to say there is nothing better than
his chainsaw shopping scene in Texas Chainsaw too, that that
is an Oscar worthy scene.

Speaker 2 (25:22):
Yeah. Now, at the time period we're talking about here, though,
is kind of like a period of ups and downs.
You know, some of the ups are notable. Like you know,
he directed and co wrote the Oscar nominated nineteen sixty
nine film Easy Writer, which of course is you know,
considered a classic. He directed seventy one's The Last Movie,
and nineteen eighties Out of the Blue, a film that

(25:45):
you know, I don't think it received much attention in
the States when it came out. There's some distribution issues,
but there's been there's been a lot of re examination
of that picture in recent years. And of course he
also appeared in seventy nine Is of poc Lips Now
during this time period as well, and that, of course
is also a very iconic performance that you know, in

(26:06):
my mind that that's one that really stands out, is
like Oh, that's Dennis Hopper. That's the sort of crazy
role that you that you come to expect from exactly.

Speaker 3 (26:14):
So we were talking about this earlier. But when I
think Dennis Hopper, I think of his roles as high
energy madmen, you know, phrenetic presence dominating the screen, and
sort of acid rogues, people who have a countercultural, rebellious
screen presence. And also I just think about his villain roles,

(26:37):
you know, Blue Velvet Speed in the nineties, that kind
of thing. I mean, you know, Speed's probably not his
most artistically significant film, but he's notable in it. Like
you can't forget Dennis Hopper and Speed. But in Nighttide,
I just kept thinking, it is hard to believe Dennis
Hopper was ever this cute. The character he plays, named

(26:59):
Johnny Drake, is naive, soft spoken, a little bit shy
and helpless, and Hopper plays this role very earnestly without
any irony that's detectable. And I say that about the
irony because I would say even in some of his
other earlier, more straightforward roles that I've seen on the screen,

(27:20):
like he's kind of a background character in Queen of Blood,
just playing one of the Astronauts and he's not doing
anything all that exciting. But I remember thinking in Queen
of Blood that you could still get this devil in
disguise energy coming off of him. Like maybe that's my imagination,
but there's this energy like, if only somebody would let

(27:41):
me out of the cage of this role, I'd tear
this place apart. And there's nothing like that here, not
even a hint. This character is very earnest and reserved,
and Hopper is fully committed to the character.

Speaker 2 (27:54):
Yeah, I agree, Hopper is really really good and Night
Tide it's fascinating performance on multiple levels. It's it's a
great performance knowing the sorts of roles and struggles that
would come to define him later on, but it's just
a great subdued, vulnerable performance, you know. I think it's
so nicely. His performance so nicely captures this sort of

(28:15):
yearning awkwardness of young adulthood, you know, like he he's
he's he's like, I'm going to get out there, I'm
gonna I'm going to live my life. But he doesn't
really know how to do that yet, how to fill
in such a large blank in the sentence of one's life. Yes,
and so his his performance is wonderful and again like
low key and and and he has this and at

(28:38):
the same time raw and it's kind of painful to
watch at times in the best of ways, like yeah,
like in a very subdued way, the exposed nerve endings
of emotion slightly grazing against the expanding realities of his world.
You know it, I don't know. It just makes you
think about being like a young person and not knowing
how to do any of the things that you feel

(29:00):
the desire to do.

Speaker 3 (29:01):
That's such a great observation. You're totally right about the Yeah,
the way that he wants to live a life but
he doesn't know how to do it. You can see
that embodied when he tells the story at the beginning
about how he always wanted to see the world, so
he joined the Navy so he could see the world.
But then he tells more like, I haven't really seen
anywhere yet, you know, I've just been here in California.

Speaker 2 (29:23):
Yeah, I think he mentions Hawaii, so about like he's
been to a military base in Hawaii and then back
here and in otherwise he's just been on a ship. Yeah,
because he's supposed to be from Denver. I believe that's right.

Speaker 3 (29:34):
Yeah, but yeah, and there are other ways that. I mean,
I think you can say that the way he's pursuing
romance is like he has a yearning and he knows
that this is something he's supposed to do and he's
trying to do it right, but he also doesn't know
how to do it. He senses there's a gap and
he's trying to cross it, but he doesn't he doesn't
know where the bridges are.

Speaker 2 (29:55):
Yeah. Yeah, I was looking up to see, you know,
outside of that commentary track, which I didn't have access for,
I was wondering what Dennis Hopper has said about the film,
and I found a quote from an interview that Amy
Greenfield did with Hopper for Curtis Harrington's Cinema on the Edge,
And I'm just going to read a quote from it.

(30:17):
Here Hopper said, and you know, also, and I think
Curtis would agree with this also. But I've always equated
what Jean Cutos was saying. I think it was Jean
Cutou who said that ninety eight percent of creation was
accident and one percent was intellect and one percent was logic.
The art was learning how to make the accident work
for you. And I think, and when I think of Nighttide,

(30:38):
I think that Curtis had a very strong script. He
knew where we were going moment to moment, but within
that there was the freedom to create and then learn
to make the accident work for us.

Speaker 3 (30:48):
Yeah, I can see that. I mean, this is a
very script bound movie. It doesn't feel improvised, like clearly
the characters are following their lines as written, and the
story is very coherent as written. But apart from like
the dialogue and the structure of the story, it does
it has the energy of one of those movies where

(31:09):
there was a lot of collaboration from the actors, Like
the actors are very much informing and contributing to their
own performances. Doesn't feel like overly controlled in terms of
how the actors are behaving and acting out their roles.
If that makes sense. Yeah, absolutely, Yeah. You know another
thing I just wanted to mention because this hadn't come

(31:31):
up yet. Apparently Dennis Hopper was a fan of Curtis
Herrington's short art films, and that was part of the
reason that he agreed to do Night Tide. Like Curtis
Harrington tells the story about how they met up in
a coffee shop and I guess this would have been
in La and they were talking about doing this project.
And I don't know how much Hopper got paid for

(31:53):
this role. I mean, maybe there was just regular ambition involved,
but clearly he was sold enough on Herrington as an artist,
on the artistic vision for the film that that was
a big part in his agreeing to do it.

Speaker 2 (32:04):
Yeah, yeah, I've read the same.

Speaker 3 (32:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (32:15):
All right, Well, let's move on to the love interest
here and our possible mermaid, and that is Mora, played
by Linda Lawson, who in nineteen thirty six through twenty
twenty two American model, singer and actress of Italian descent
born Linda Gloria Sposiani. Her early career highlights were tied
to American nuclear weapons testing. She won the Atomic Pageant

(32:37):
in Las Vegas in nineteen fifty five. This was at
the time of Operation Q, the Operation Q test, and
so her nickname was Miss Q. Yes, she was an
atomic pin up girl.

Speaker 3 (32:49):
Bizarre. It's hard to imagine this was ever really a
thing like a beauty pageant tied inherently to weapons testing.

Speaker 2 (32:58):
Yeah, the good old days when a test program for
a weapon of mass destruction had a sexy pr push
Yeah crazy yeah, so yeah. I think she was a
showgirl at the Sands Hotel at the time, and then
she got this gig as the Atomic pin up girl.
But after this she got into acting with TV roles
on various shows of the late fifties and sixties, including

(33:18):
episodes of Sea Hunt and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and her
first film role was nineteen sixties The Threat, followed by
Night Tide. Afterwards. She continued to work in TV with
rolls really into the mid two thousands. Her other credits
include nineteen sixty six is Let's Kill Uncle? That's from
William Castle.

Speaker 3 (33:37):
Oh the movie house gimmicks guy like the Tingler? Did
he do the Tingler?

Speaker 2 (33:41):
He did? Yeah? Yeah, I'm not sure what the gimmick
would have been for Let's Kill Uncle, like, you know,
bring your uncle to the movie theater. If someone kills him,
your ticket, his ticket is on us. I don't know,
Oh boy. She was also in sixty seven's Magical Mystery Tour.
I believe that one's generally considered one of the lesser
Beatles films. Yeah. Also nineteen seventy one sometimes a great

(34:02):
notion directed by and starring Paul Newman, as well as
nineteen seventies Miss Stones. Thing. That one actually has ed
Wood Junior in it as an actor. As an actor, yeah,
I think he has just a small role and I
think one of his alter egos there and then oh yeah,
she also put out a smooth jazz pop album in
nineteen sixty. Wow.

Speaker 3 (34:25):
I think Linda Lawson is fantastic in this movie. Some
people have characterized her role as a fem fatale, and
have also noted that Harrington's movies, especially even his short films,
the less narratively focused shorter films, had fem fatale like
figures in them, and in terms of explicit role in

(34:45):
the plot, you could say fem fatale makes sense because
we do learn she is suspected of having murdered her
two previous boyfriends, and the audience has to wonder if
maybe Johnny is next. But she doesn't play this character
like the typical film fatale from the era. You know

(35:05):
that character, I think is often portrayed as dangerous, untrustworthy,
possibly a heartless woman with secrets and hidden designs, to
the extent that Moura in Knighttide has secrets, and I
think maybe you are supposed to wonder if she has secrets.
It feels like she might not be aware of them
fully herself. They don't feel like schemes. They feel like

(35:29):
secrets that are operating upon her rather than you know,
from her desires. And so Lawson is quite mysterious, and
she has this great, you know, kind of unspoken thing
that she does in a lot of scenes where it
looks like she is maybe thinking something very strange that

(35:49):
she's not ready to say out loud. But she does
not come off like a villain or like a heartless
person working a scheme. So despite the structural threat she
poses within the plot, Maura is very sympathetic and I
would say even lovable, and a lot of that is
from Lawson's performance. I think she's great.

Speaker 2 (36:08):
You know, there's probably like a sliding scale when you're
considering a character in a film that may be a
mermaid or a siren, where on one hand you've got
like full fem fatale or even full monster, and then
on the other end like complete doll person. You know,
we've all seen films like this often played up for
comedic effects where it's like, how do I do human?

(36:28):
You know, how do I behave as a human being?
How do I eat lobster at dinner table? That sort
of thing. You know, she doesn't feel like that. She
doesn't feel like that at all, And she doesn't feel
like the extreme either. She's somewhere in a nice, comfortable middle,
which of course is a great place to be because
that's where everyone is. You know, we can see her
on the screen, we can have these questions about her
and even wonder if she's some sort of a supernatural

(36:51):
entity or other worldly being, but she's still you know,
everything we see from her we can relate to.

Speaker 3 (36:57):
There's enough about her that is just clearly normally earthy
and human. We see her enjoying food, we see her
going out and enjoying music, you know, sitting there and
trying to listen to music while Johnny's bothering her. There's
enough about her that does feel human. She is not
just the terror and the panic that maybe she's being

(37:19):
called to the sea, but then these mysterious sort of
waves roll over her and that becomes part of her
in the moments where it's relevant in the plot. But
she's very human at other times.

Speaker 2 (37:31):
Yeah. Yeah, all right, we have a character I think
we referred to m already. Sam Captain Samuel Murdoch also
an important character. We eventually learn that he is essentially
her father figure. Yeah, that he had adopted her founder
on an island at some point and has been her caretaker,
and he runs the Mermaid Show.

Speaker 3 (37:53):
Yeah, he does also run the Mermaid Show. He is
her adoptive father, and he also is her boss at
the Mermaid Show.

Speaker 2 (38:00):
Well. Yeah, he has completely shaped the world that she
lives in in ways that are particular to this story
that you know, you could apply to any kind of
like parental scenario, or you could even view him outside
of the rental confines and just see him as kind
of just a general authority figure for what she is
and how she fits into the world. Yeah. But this

(38:21):
character is played by Gavin Muir, who lived nineteen hundred
through nineteen seventy two. Chicago born English educate educated actor
of the stage, screen, and TV, often affected a British
accent in his roles. He was a Broadway performer as well.
This was the tail end of his acting career, his
final film with only a single TV role. Afterwards in

(38:42):
sixty five, but his credits go back to nineteen thirty two.
Other notable films include thirty six's Mary Queen of Scott's,
forty five's The House of Fear, and Abd and Costello
Meet the Invisible Man in fifty one. Peter Loriie was
reportedly the first pick for this role, but was to
expense and I believe Laurie and Muir once worked together

(39:04):
in the same episode of nineteen fifty six's Operation Cicero.
But anyway, as much as I love Peter Lourie, I
can't picture louri in this role. I feel like Gavin
Muir does a great job here, and he provides a
nice theatrical counterpoint to Hopper's naturalistic style. So again, Hopper

(39:25):
is very subdued and believable. But Sam here is, you know,
he's a little bit more bombastic and theatrical, you know
he is. He's literally like a barker at the carnival
for the Mermaid Show. And this kind of showmanship seems
to permeate a lot of a number of aspects of

(39:45):
his life.

Speaker 3 (39:45):
He's on he's playing. I liked this character a lot
more on second viewing because the first time, I was like,
when we're getting to know him in his early scenes,
I'm like, he's I don't know, he kind of buffoonish sometimes.
But then on second viewing, I realized, like, oh, this

(40:06):
is not just the actor playing the character. The character
is an actor. The character is a performer, and he's
playing a guy who is always performing, like his persona
is kind of a performance, and he's performing for Johnny
as well, even when people aren't really watching. Yeah, you know,
he's playing a kind of familiar, stock, jovial English sea

(40:28):
captain character and that's the role he plays at the
Mermaid Attraction for the crowds, and so he's still playing
it all the time. I guess the question is like,
is there a division between the persona he uses when
he's performing at work versus who he is and his
off time. And then I guess you could ask the
same question about Mora really is she really the thing?

(40:51):
She's just acting pretending to be at this attraction? But
man thinking about this, but anyway, Yeah, so I liked
this character a lot better this second time. He seemed
more interesting and more complex the second time. Also, I
think though I'd love Peter Laurie so much. Peter Laurie
I think would have brought too much suspicion to this

(41:11):
character if just by being cast you'd immediately been thinking like,
what's the Skuy's deal? Whereas Kevin Muir here is very
disarming at first.

Speaker 2 (41:21):
Yeah, absolutely so I really liked him in this all right.
Some getting into some of the side characters been in
this case a very important side character. We have the
character Ellen Sands, played by Lewana Anders, who lived nineteen
thirty eight through nineteen ninety six. She is an interesting
figure in the cinema of the fifties and sixties, especially
those who was active into the mid nineties. She began

(41:44):
as a byte messenger at MGM, alongside various other folks
starting out their careers with small studio roles like this,
including Jack Nicholson, who she apparently attended an improv class with.
Her first role was in fifty seven's Reform School Girls
that was a Samuel ze Arkov production, followed by a
handful of crime films before Night Tide. Given her connections

(42:06):
at this point to Nicholson and now Hopper, it should
come as no surprise that she begins popping up in
Corman productions there uch as Pitting the Pendulum in sixty one,
sixty three's The Young Racers, Francis Ford Coppola's debut film
Dementia thirteen and sixty three, and The Trip in sixty
seven Wow. She also went on to appear in sixty

(42:26):
nine's Easy Rider, which again Hopper directed, playing Lisa, one
of the hippie girls, and she'd also continue to appear
in various Jack Nicholson films over the years, including seventy
three Is the Last Detail, seventy six Is Missouri Breaks,
seventy eight's Going South, and The Two Jakes.

Speaker 3 (42:42):
In nineteen ninety, she brought myself to watch The Two Jakes.

Speaker 2 (42:48):
Two Jake I'm trying trying to remember is Two Jakes
the sequel to Chinatown. Yes, okay, all right, that's all
I know about it. Yeah, and it features two Jakes
one way or another. I don't know. I like films
that feature two of something like The Big Lebowski has
two lebowskis.

Speaker 3 (43:05):
Exactly what I was thinking of it.

Speaker 2 (43:06):
Yeah, at any rate, Yeah, maybe it's good right in
if you have opinions on the Two Jakes, But.

Speaker 3 (43:12):
You're a Jake Kitties, I'm a Jake Kitti.

Speaker 2 (43:15):
Who plays the other Jake. Is it a dual role?
I don't know, anyways. Andrews also worked with Harrington on
sixty seven's Games and seventy three is The Killing Kind
and she pops up in a bizarre horror film in
which Andy Rooney plays an insane Hollywood makeup artist who
kidnaps women. That's nineteen seventy one's the Manipulator, Okay, but

(43:37):
I really liked her here as well. A supporting but
important role was a kind of She's almost like the
counter to Mara's siren song. While Mora is often detached
and you know, and potentially otherworldly, Allen is very much
positioned as an all American girl, you know, very much
part of the world. But you know, I think one

(43:59):
of the interesting questionestion is does she also have her
own sort of siren song here? Is she presenting kind
of a compromise to the desires that Johnny in particular
is feeling. Is she like a safe choice in a
world that denies your desires?

Speaker 3 (44:13):
That's a very good point. Is She's an interesting character
in exactly that way. So while Johnny is starting to
he loves Mara, he's clearly in love with her, but
he's starting to have all these questions and fears about
what she is and what, you know, what she might
mean for him. Here's Ellen over here, who clearly is
infatuated with him. Ellen clearly likes him, and she seems safe.

(44:37):
She seems so safe. So there, it's a different kind
of temptation than we usually see in romance stories. Often
the temptation is a temptation too danger from what is safer.
Here it goes the other way around.

Speaker 2 (44:51):
Yeah, yeah, the danger is Yeah, you take the easy road,
but then where does that lead in the end, Like
what sort of life for you potentially, you know, intunbeing
yourself Finn.

Speaker 3 (45:00):
Yeah, I mean to be clear that it doesn't seem
like there's anything wrong with Ellen.

Speaker 2 (45:04):
No, No, she seems like she seems fine.

Speaker 3 (45:06):
Yeah, she she likes him, she's a nice person all,
you know, basically everything about her that I can recall,
I don't recall anything, you know, anything negative coming off
of her in the movie. But she's not the person
Johnny loves. And so I guess there's a question of
like it's like your true love versus just what seems safer.

Speaker 2 (45:27):
Yeah, and you know, spoiler here. Of course we're past spoilers,
but this is who Johnny's going to end up with.
And you could certainly watch this film and totally read
it like, oh yeah, he ended up with the good girl.
That's great, happy ending. But you can also read it
the other way. And that's one of the beautiful things
about this film.

Speaker 3 (45:42):
I think you should read it the other way, or
maybe should is too strong, and you know, I don't
want to instruct people how to interpret the film, but
I mean I think it the loss of Mora is
the tragedy that is the lost love. You know that
his love for her was real and her love for
him was real, and so something is law when he
ends up with Ellen.

Speaker 2 (46:01):
Yeah, all right. Some other supporting characters of note here,
we have a character by the name of Madame Romanovitch
who pops up. She's like a tearro reader that has
a great scene with Johnny and she's.

Speaker 3 (46:14):
Call her a fortune teller. Oh yeah, romance, that's right.

Speaker 2 (46:18):
She's very particular about that. But she's played by Marjorie
Eaton with nineteen oh one through nineteen eighty six, American actress,
perhaps best known at least to many out there in
a kind of a trivia sense, as the original actor
to play the Emperor in nineteen eighties, The Empire Strikes.

Speaker 3 (46:36):
Back, unbelievable. Yeah, I think they gave her chimpanzee eyes,
didn't they.

Speaker 2 (46:40):
Yeah, she's got She's under a whole lot of makeup
with these giant eyes and a big black robe on,
and she's also not doing her own voice. She's dubbed
by a male actor. But it was, you know, originally
this was the glimpse we had of the Emperor on
the like the hollow presentation inside of Darth Vader's meditation chamber,

(47:03):
and it's and of course later that scene ends up
being replaced with footage of the I mcdarman performance of
Palpatine that we would get in Return of the Jedi
in the prequels to follow. Yeah, but anyway, that's what that's,
you know, one of the things she's known for. But
as a full performer, she's also known for roles in

(47:24):
forty nine's The forsyth Woman, sixty three's Monstrosity, and sixty
four is Mary Poppins. She was also in Harrington's The
Killing Kind and you know, fun little performance here, you know,
totally solid you do not get any Emperor Palpatine vibes
from No.

Speaker 3 (47:39):
She has a fun little scene doing a tarot reading
for Johnny in this movie, Rob. I wondered, what, though,
what you made of her rant against tea bags. You're
a fan of tea bags, right, yeah, I mean I
generally fill my own tea bags. Oh okay, yeah, but
I still use them. I've used other methods of straining

(48:00):
the leaves out. But her main thing is it's just
difficult to read someone's fortune if you don't have the
tea leaves in the you know, at the bottom of
the cup and all. So that's that's not my primary
ambition in making a cup of tea.

Speaker 2 (48:13):
So you know, we differ in that detail.

Speaker 3 (48:16):
Yeah, she's a professional grudge against tea bags. Yes, but hey,
this is not the only interesting Marjorie in the cast here.

Speaker 2 (48:25):
Yes, that's right. We also have Marjorie Cameron here credited
as Cameron, and she plays a figure that is credited
as the Water, which I believe, but you might just
more distinctly refer to her as like the mysterious woman.
There's a mysterious woman that shows up we already mentioned him,
shows up speaking to Moura in some sort of foreign language.

(48:48):
I think it is actually Greek, but it's all Greek
to me. But yes, credited here as Cameron, and she
was herself a very fascinating counterculture figure of the time,
an American an artist, poet, actress, and occultist. She was
a follower of the esoteric religious movement known as the Lima,
founded in the early nineteen hundreds by Alistair Crowley, who,

(49:11):
of course lived eighteen seventy five through nineteen forty seven.
At this point, she was still married to another Thelamite
of note, American rocket engineer Jack Parsons.

Speaker 3 (49:21):
Man, we are hitting some weird connections with this movie, Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (49:26):
Yeah, absolutely. I mean this is just kind of like
the counter culture scene in and around LA that this
movie is rising out of. It's pretty fascinating.

Speaker 3 (49:36):
So would I be correct in assuming that Marjorie Cameron
was sort of connected to Harrington's world through more like
the art scene, like avant garde films.

Speaker 2 (49:46):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, she was very much a part of
the avant garde arts scene. I'm to understand she was
friends with both Harrington and Kenneth Anger, who we mentioned already.
She appeared in Harrington's nineteen fifty six short film Wormwood Star.
She's also in Kenneth Anger's Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome
from fifty four. Nighttide was her fourth film and also

(50:09):
her last film, but she remained active as a poet
and an artist after this. So a nice enigmatic screen
presence here, and truly she gets to be one of
the film's real pervasive mysteries. Oh yeah, yeah, all right,
just a couple behind the scenes notes. The cinematographer on
this film was Villis Lapinix, who lived nineteen thirty one

(50:33):
through nineteen eighty seven, Latvian born cinematographer, best known for
his work on various genre films. He later won a
Primetime Emmy in seventy five for his work on the
television series Kojak. His credits include fifty eight's Hideous Sun Demon,
nineteen sixties, The Little Shop of Horrors, sixty two's Ega,
sixty five's Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet, seventy one's The

(50:54):
Hellstrom Chronicle, seventy seven's Night Tear, seventy one Cisco Pike,
and the nineteen eighty one sci fi comedy The Creature
Wasn't Nice. Starring Leslie Nielsen.

Speaker 3 (51:04):
I'm gonna say the cinematography in Nighttide is significantly better
than his work in Ego.

Speaker 2 (51:11):
Yeah, ega as I remember very much. A Let's shoot
this puppy between the hours of like noon and two
am in California. Lets get as much natural, like oppressive
light as possible. Yeah, all right? And then finally, the
composer here is David Raskin, who lived nineteen twelve through
two thousand and four. Two time Oscar nominee for forty Eights, Forever,

(51:33):
Amber and fifty nine separate tables. His work in film
goes back to the thirties, but often in uncredited form.
His other work includes thirty nine to Gorilla, sixty three
Scorpio Rising, that's the Kenneth Anger work, and eighty three's
The Day After. That's Nicholas Meyer, who talked about on
the show before. He also worked with Harrington on What's
the Matter with Helen?

Speaker 3 (52:01):
All Right, would you like to talk about the plot?
Let's do it, Okay. I think the best way to
do this is we're not going to narrate the whole
movie scene by scene, but we are going to focus
more closely on some stuff in the first half and
then maybe talk in a more summary way about the
second half of the film. So I especially want to
look at the opening few minutes in a lot of

(52:21):
detail because I think there's a lot of subtlety here
and they establish some interesting things. So the credits play
over crashing waves on the beach and there's eerie obo music,
and in between the credits we see a young man
Dennis Hopper. Again. This is you know, it might be
hard to picture Dennis Hopper this way if you've never

(52:42):
seen him before. Like easy rider, but very smooth, super
clean cut in a navy uniform. He's leaning on the
wooden railing at the boardwalk and smoking a cigarette. And
it's nighttime and we can see the glare of theater
Marquee is flashing behind him, and.

Speaker 2 (52:59):
This is nighttime. Yes, this is like that's one of
the reasons this film I think really should be seen
in black and white. These early scenes especially, you have
just a great play between the darkness and the light.

Speaker 3 (53:11):
Yeah, the bright lights on the Marquees and at the
games that we're going to see in a minute. So
this is our main character, Johnny Drake. He's a young
Navy recruit, we will find out he's originally from Denver, Colorado,
and he's currently on shore leave in Santa Monica, California.
So in this first shot, he is smoking a cigarette
by himself on the pier, and I would say something

(53:34):
about him conveys loneliness. I think it's kind of there.
And the way he takes a puff and then he
cradles his chin in the palm of his hand and
just looks out over the water. He seems sweet, also
kind of bored and be like he doesn't know what
he should be doing. Johnny finishes his cigarette and then
he goes out, wandering past the arcade games on the

(53:56):
pier and past a shooting gallery. He stops in a
store and tries out a guess your Weight machine. It
says like, you know, game is free if you guess correctly.
We never see if he guesses right. He puts a
coin in and checks it out. Then he straightens out
his uniform and goes by himself into a photo booth,

(54:16):
and the camera follows him inside the booth and we
see him going from this kind of slack straight face
to suddenly cocking his face up in a smile. When
the flash goes bright, and then he comes out and
he studies the pictures that get printed out, and he
seems to take them as feedback. He like adjusts the
tilt of his hat as if that might address something

(54:37):
that is lacking in the way he looks in the photos.
And I love that little moment.

Speaker 2 (54:41):
Yeah. Yeah, it's a lot more expensive than just buying
a mirror, but yeah, so it's a nice moment. Yeah,
there's very much the same, the sense that you know,
he is out there looking for life, he wants to
experience life. But you know, ironically he is you know,
at a carnival environment, you know, at the pier where
everything is being like very much sold to you, the

(55:02):
idea of like, this will be fun, guessing your weight
up via machine. That's fun, right, give it a go,
give us some money for it, and then you know,
inevitably it's going to be disappointing.

Speaker 3 (55:11):
So next Johnny wanders into a jazz club called the
Blue Grotto. We see it outside. It's rob Do you
know what this light thing is? There's like a light
bulb above and then below the light bulb there is
what looks like a dangling eggsack full of translucent glass.
Spheres or something, but I guess it creates an interesting

(55:33):
way of reflecting all the light. I don't know. I
kind of want one of these for my house.

Speaker 2 (55:37):
Whatever it is, Yeah, yeah, it's not at first thought
that it was going to be like, you know, glass
floats from from you know, the kind they used to
use with fishing nets and all. But I don't think
that's what it is. It's just some sort of weird
diffuser and also not a mirror ball, but yeah, something else.
I don't know. I've never seen this before anyway.

Speaker 3 (55:58):
Johnny goes into the Blue Grotto where a hip jazz
combo is playing. It is a very flute forward jazz band.
You don't, at least I don't. Maybe I'm not worldly enough.
I don't often think of flute forward jazz, but that's
what's going on here.

Speaker 2 (56:13):
Do you have a little jazz flute? Yeah? I think
Howard Moon would approve.

Speaker 3 (56:17):
Okay, So the club is in a basement, and when
Johnny enters from the street level, he has to go
in by descending down a staircase like he's going into
an underworld, and he stops on the stairs to look
out over the crowd, and then the camera pans over
the people to kind of give us a flavor. And
I think it's interesting because Rob, I don't know, maybe

(56:39):
you've got a different impression, but to my eyes, this
is not the kind of crowd that a movie usually
picks to fill a club scene because and the reason is,
this crowd seems kind of culturally mixed. Like you've got
young and old. You've got some hips in sunglasses and
cool clothes who are very on frequency with the band,

(57:00):
and then you've got other people who just look like
squares who wandered in off the street. Do you know
what I'm talking about here?

Speaker 2 (57:06):
Yeah, I know what you mean. Oftentimes, though we'd see
this sort of setting in far lesser films, we have
like some sort of a club scum right where we
want to get a very clear idea apart across that
this is like a bad place and it's full of scoundrels.
Here though, it kind of feels like, oh, Johnny has
finally found a place of authentic interest. You know, it's
not just some sort of carnival trick, Like this is

(57:28):
actual art going on and people were here to experience it.

Speaker 3 (57:31):
Yeah, So Johnny pauses while he's coming down the stairs.
It seems like he feels drawn to this place, but
maybe he doesn't know how he fits in. And you
can see these subtle signs of anxiety and Hopper's body language,
like in the way he keeps folding and kneading his
sailor's cap and his hands while he's walking around looking
for a place to sit. And then also after he did,

(57:55):
you know, as after he gets a beer, he pours
half of it out into so he's got the bottle.
He pours half of the bottle into this class mug,
but he pours it badly, so it's got this huge,
massive head on top. And then you see him not
knowing which to take a sip out of, so he's
like bottle, no weight glass, So he's watching the band
awkwardly alternating which thing he's trying to take a sip

(58:17):
out of. And then he goes to sit down and
finds a place with his back to the wall, basically
sitting beside the band, looking out over the crowd, and
he sees a man and a woman sitting together, with
the man kind of gallantly lighting a cigarette for the woman.
He sees a lonely looking old man sitting by himself
in a dark alcove with the light of a lamp

(58:39):
reflecting off of his bald head. And then he sees
a meaty looking guy in a square haircut who looks
like he could maybe be in the Armed forces himself,
and he's sitting at a table with two women, with
one of the women stroking his hair while they talk.
Then he sees another man sitting alone, haggard, staring at
the floor, with a bunch of empty bottles at his table.
This guy's in a night of heavy drinking. And then

(59:02):
finally a couple sitting nestled together, with the man's arm
around the woman, and they're whispering to each other intently
while their faces are just a few inches apart. I
feel like the effect of this pan across the room
is almost like, just in very quick successions, seeing lots
of different ways your life could go. Yeah, like seeing

(59:27):
people who look like they're happy and in love, and
seeing people who look like they're they're you know, crashed
out and in a terrible place, and then maybe other
kind of strange positions somewhere in between. But I feel
like it fits in very much with the we see
the way Johnny looks at the world in this scene,
and it's very much one of not knowing how he

(59:48):
fits in or what kind of course his life is
going to take.

Speaker 2 (59:52):
Yeah, but with the suspicion that it's like companionship is important,
and like the people who have companionship their lives seem active.
In those who are not attached, they seem lonely, and
I don't want to be one of them. How are
people looking at me alone in this club?

Speaker 3 (01:00:08):
Yeah? So finally the camera pans over to land on
Linda Lawson playing the character that we will come to
know as Maura. She is sitting by herself, looking beautiful,
mysterious and very intense. But I would also say inscrutable.
I don't know exactly what the word for this is,
but Rob, I hope you'd agree. Like she has a

(01:00:29):
way of looking very intense without looking very emotional.

Speaker 2 (01:00:35):
Yeah, Like you almost expect her to have a notebook
at the hand and she's like maybe taking notes about
the performance.

Speaker 3 (01:00:41):
Yeah. So the other people we saw were mostly quite
emotionally readable, like they were happy or at least content,
or they looked lonely and run down, and Maura's face
doesn't tell us much. Maybe there is a sense that
she is practiced at hiding emotional information, which might make

(01:01:01):
more sense later on. But she's watching the band mouth flat,
bobbing her head slightly to the music. And I only
noticed this on the second viewing. I didn't pick it
up the first time. But the way she's dressed here
is interesting. Everybody else is dressed in what looks like
fairly normal kind of sixties club clothes or just sixties

(01:01:22):
street clothes. Maura is wearing a white dress that is
draped in a way that looks a lot like how
they would dress women to be ancient Greeks or Romans
in the movies of this time.

Speaker 2 (01:01:35):
Yes, yeah, she really does.

Speaker 3 (01:01:37):
Yeah, there is nothing about looking at her that gives
her away as being of the twentieth century. She's not
wearing a watch or any modern fashion or anything that
looks twentieth centuries like. She looks like she could be
a Greek goddess. And then another thing I would say
is that she does not look approachable. She is giving
off big, leave me alone energy, which Johnny promptly ignores.

Speaker 2 (01:02:00):
Yeah. Yeah, it's like awkwardly sets across from the hottest
woman in the entire venue and then proceeds to think
that he can talk to her during the middle of
the performance.

Speaker 3 (01:02:10):
Hi, what's up. Yeah, so Johnny, he comes across the room.
He takes a moment to work up his courage, and
then he asks if he can sit down at her
table because he says he can't see the band from
where he's sitting, and she says that's fine. She's being polite,
and he's so nervous and cute here. He kind of
laughs at himself while he's asking to sit, And then

(01:02:32):
after he sits down, he tries to make conversation with her,
but she's like, I'd like to listen to the band please,
So he's like, oh, okay, and then he offers to
buy her a drink. She says no, thank you. He
offers again, she says no, thank you again. Seems like
this is going nowhere, like she's being polite but she's
not looking for company. But then everything changes because suddenly,

(01:02:52):
in the back of the club, a woman emerges from
behind a curtain and walks into the crowd. She's dressed
in all black, in a gown with black sheer sleeves
and a long dangling gold necklace. She has heavy eye
makeup on, and there's something instantly ominous and kind of
enchanted looking about her. This is the character that I

(01:03:15):
think in the credits maybe is called water Witch or
people called the sea Witch. But again, you could think
of her at this point as just a mysterious woman.
So she steps into view and she locks eyes on Maura.
Mara sees her and then looks back, and it's kind
of like they know each other, but somehow the shared
gaze is not friendly. It is threatening and hypnotic. She

(01:03:38):
approaches the table and she begins to speak to Maura
in another language. There are no subtitles, so we have
no idea what she's saying. I read online. I don't
know if this is true, but I read online like
a user comment somewhere saying that she is speaking in
Greek and she's saying something along the lines of you
will come and join us soon. Yeah, So, whether or

(01:04:00):
not that's true, that feels like what she could be
saying in this scene, and I think it is not
something that the audience is supposed to understand. It's unclear actually,
if Maura understands what she's saying. The tone of the
speech is not friendly. It feels like a piece of
maybe threatening information is being delivered, and then Mara's eyes

(01:04:21):
flare and she looks disturbed, and the woman walks away.
So Johnny's just oblivious this whole time. He's like, huh,
who was that? And Mora says she doesn't know. She's
already like trying to get out, like this has alarmed her,
and she's like nervously collecting her things and trying to leave,
and Johnny's like, hey, what did that woman say to you?

(01:04:41):
Morris says nothing and then hurriedly asks Johnny if he'll
pay for her check, and then she bolts for the exit,
so Johnny follows. On his way out the door, he
looks back and he makes eye contact with the Sea Witch,
who is now sitting at a table, just stroking the
stem of a cocktail glass, very impassive, but she doesn't
look away. She just like stares straight back at Johnny.

(01:05:03):
She stares him down and he has to turn and run.
So after this, Johnny follows Mora out into the streets,
which are now lonely and deserted. Earlier they were full
of people going around to the different games and shops
and stuff. And I guess now it's late, so Mara
tries to tell Johnny to leave her alone, but Johnny
is persistent, and eventually Mara agrees to let him walk

(01:05:24):
her home. When they get to her apartment, Johnny realizes
that the building houses a Merry Go Round, and he
laughs at this and asks if she lives inside a
wooden horse. It's unclear to me if the character Johnny
is supposed to be aware of the trojan horse implications
of this question. I think the writer, like Curtis Harrington,

(01:05:46):
is aware, and I think the audience is supposed to
be aware, But I don't know whether Johnny is supposed
to understand what he's saying there. I don't know if
you had an opinion.

Speaker 2 (01:05:54):
On that, But no, I mean I think yet Johnny
doesn't really pick up on it. And yeah, I think
we as the audience are to pick up on it
to some degree.

Speaker 3 (01:06:05):
Johnny not super familiar with the classics, as we will
learn from a later scene. Yeah, but the question breaks
through and Mara laughs at this, and she says, no,
her apartment is upstairs, it's above the Merry Go Round.
They talk about the pros and cons of living over
a Merry Go Round. Cons include It's noisy pros include
the music reminds her of when she was a child,

(01:06:26):
and you can see in this exchange that despite you know,
she was not interested at first, now she's starting to
like Johnny. Johnny then tries some inappropriately aggressive cording. He
tries to get her to invite him upstairs, but she
says no. He tries to kiss her. She's not ready. However,
she does eventually tell him that they can see each
other again, and she invites him to come over in

(01:06:47):
the morning so she can cook him breakfast, which seems
like a weird date. I don't know is that, but anyway,
Johnny is thrilled, so she goes upstairs and he is
just so related. He climbs up on the handrailing of
the boardwalk and walks along the top of it like
a kid.

Speaker 2 (01:07:04):
Yeah. I think it's a great scene here, because in
all of this you get the sense that neither of
them really know how any of this really works. They
just kind of have vague ideas about how courtship is
supposed to work. And Johnny, we might we can I
think very much assume that Johnny has maybe just is
just acting on stories that he's heard from Navy buddies

(01:07:25):
to a large extent, like this is how it works.
And then maybe more doesn't really know either, And so yeah,
they're gonna end up having this weird second date where
they have breakfast.

Speaker 3 (01:07:34):
Yeah, but I love this second date scene, actually the
fish breakfast scene. So Johnny comes back brighton early, and
you can tell he really set his alarm clock for
this one. He is still wearing his navy uniform. I
don't know exactly what we're supposed to read into this,
like are these the only clothes he has or the
nicest clothes? Is he trying to impress her? I'm not

(01:07:57):
quite sure, but like he's often wearing this this navy
uniform and scenes where he's not on duty.

Speaker 2 (01:08:03):
You know, you may have read this as well, but
I read that in order to properly shoot the navy
uniform that Dennis Hopper is wearing, they had to like
have a slightly dingy navy uniform, So like a pure
white one would I guess maybe just be too bright
on the screen or it wouldn't read didn't look good,
it didn't look the way they wanted to, So they
had to have him in a slightly dingy one, but

(01:08:25):
then like they were out shooting and like somebody, like
somebody actually in the navy like reprimanded Hopper on wearing
such a dingy uniform and they'd be like, no, no, no,
it's for a movie Justice. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:08:35):
Yeah, some navy guys tried to get him for not
being up to dress code, which is hilarious imagining him
being like impressed back to sea or something grabbed Dennis
Hopper and take him to the boat. Yeah, but anyway,
Dennis Hopper, he comes back. So Johnny has a nice
introduction to the older man who runs the Merry Go
Round downstairs, and he takes some time to admire the

(01:08:58):
hand carved wooden horses. You can tell he's just over.
He's just so excited to be coming back to have
breakfast with Mora. He's like, you know, the whole world
is bright. And Johnny also meets Ellen, the granddaughter of
the Merry Go Round. Grandpa Ellen is about Johnny's age,
and they're getting along well. But when the Merry Go
Round man finds out that Johnny is here to visit Mora,

(01:09:21):
his mood kind of darkens and he seems a little concerned.
He asks if Johnny just met her for the first time,
and for some reason, Johnny gets kind of sheepish and
he lies. He says, no, no, I've known her for
a while. I don't know exactly why he lies here,
And maybe he doesn't really understand either. He just kind
of feels off guard and like maybe something's wrong or

(01:09:42):
I don't know, or maybe I don't know if there's
a thing about propriety, like should he be visiting her
apartment if you just met her.

Speaker 2 (01:09:49):
Yeah, that's kind of the vibe I got from it,
where he's like, oh, you just meet this woman, and
you know, if he were to say, yeah, I just
met her last night, and you know, this is just
some stranger and he didn't know what the strange getting
at either.

Speaker 3 (01:10:01):
Yeah, you can hear church bells tolling while Johnny had
upstairs to see her. By the way, on the way
up the stairs, Johnny crosses paths with the guy who
I am pretty sure is the same actor who played
the night watchman from The Wasp Woman, Remember the guy
who likes radio programs And then Susan Cabot eats.

Speaker 2 (01:10:19):
Yes, yes, yeah, I didn't clock that, but but it's
so good connection.

Speaker 3 (01:10:24):
Anyway, Johnny goes up to Mora's apartment. Of course, this
would be another Roger Corman connection. So Johnny goes up
to Mora's apartment. She welcomes him inside. Her mood seems
a lot happier than the night before. She shows him around.
Her apartment is decorated with sea stars and other things
she's collected from the ocean, and you can hear the

(01:10:45):
waves outside the window. So it's an overwhelming presence of
the sea in this apartment, both from within and from without.
And so they go out to eat breakfast on the balcony,
which looks out over the beach. Her balcony has an
amazing view of the sea and you can see people
swimming down below. And they sit down. Johnny suggests that
they make a toast. He says, to you and me

(01:11:07):
and to the beautiful Pacific that had more significance the
second time I saw it, Like you might want to
reconsider inviting the Pacific Ocean to be a third party
in their relationship. Notably, Mora just says to us, Johnny,
she does not mention Pacific. But so what are they
having for breakfast? Just fish? Yeah, that's it. Fish, nothing else.

(01:11:30):
It's two mackerel she has cooked. She says she got
them this morning. She doesn't say where she got them.
Did she get them at the market or.

Speaker 2 (01:11:38):
I mean at this point in the movie. If you
go into this movie at all, you know that there's
some possibility of mermaids. So yeah, I was like wondering,
did she just dive in and she caught all of
these or these caught them with their bare hands and
brought them up, you know. And I was also wondering,
how much of a kind of like Splash Mermaid out
of water scenario are we going to get it. She's
gonna start eating like fish heads and stuff, but now

(01:11:59):
we don't get any of that. Love moreplash.

Speaker 3 (01:12:01):
Have you seen Splash?

Speaker 2 (01:12:02):
Yeah, it's been on. This is one that me and
my sisters used to watch. We had it on VHS,
probably like taped off a TV or maybe it was
an actual VHS. We watched it a lot because they
were super into Mermaids. And it's just a really good movie.
As I recall, I have not seen it in decades,
but I probably should revisit it.

Speaker 3 (01:12:19):
Is the premise, is it Tom Hanks and Daryl Hannah? Yes, yeah, yeah, Okay,
and like she's a mermaid, and if she's a legit.

Speaker 2 (01:12:26):
Mermaid, yeah, and then you know there are all these
It's very much a Mermaid out of Water film, with
some hilarious sequences, including a scene where they get lobster
at a restaurant and she begins to like eat the
lobster whole, like shell and all like a sea animal wood.
And it's a great scene.

Speaker 3 (01:12:43):
Well, some excellent overlap with Night Tide because more here
goes on about how she loves food from the ocean.
She's like, I love lobster, crab, sea urchin. She described
sea urchin as like a beautiful fruit from the sea
that you just scoop up and eat. Johnny's never had it,
of course, I get the feeling. Johnny's Johnny's very chicken
nuggets guy. Like he's not not tried a lot of foods.

Speaker 2 (01:13:05):
But he wants to and that's and that's a great thing.
Like he wants these news new experiences and he's open
to try anything.

Speaker 3 (01:13:10):
Yeah. So also I think maybe he does not like fish,
but he doesn't say anything about it. You see him
take a tiny bite of his mackerel and then he
pauses for a minute and he goes.

Speaker 2 (01:13:21):
Hmm, yeah, I mean, do we know that the fish
is indeed cooked? That was I think I thought I
had When it flakes, yeah, I think, yeah, flakes. It's okay.

Speaker 3 (01:13:31):
But they make conversation. So in the scene, Johnny learns
about Mara's job. Maura works at a carnival attraction out
on the pier, the Santa Monica Pier, where she performs
as a mermaid. So she puts on an artificial fish
tail that covers her legs and then she lies down
in a tank that makes it look like she's underwater

(01:13:52):
and people pay twenty five cents to come look at her.
More of the mermaid, and then Johnny tells her about himself.
He tells her that he grew up in Denver, Colorado.
His father left his family when he was a baby,
so he grew up very close to his mother. He
always wanted to travel and see the world, but he couldn't,
And then after his mother died, he figured out that
he could see other parts of the world if he

(01:14:14):
joined the navy, So that's what he did. Though he
hasn't been much of anywhere really, like you said, I think,
he says, maybe he's only been to Hawaii so far,
but more is encouraging. She's like, I think you'll you'll
get to travel yet. But then from here, they're eating
their food and there are seagulls circling and they're suddenly
menaced by gulls, and strangely, one of them flies down

(01:14:37):
and lands right in Mora's arms, and then she holds
it like a cat, stroking its feathers, and Johnny is
a little He's like, wow, where'd you learn to do that?
And Mora says she does not remember. She maybe learned
it on the island where she was born, and she's
kind of muttering, sweet little bird, don't be afraid.

Speaker 2 (01:14:56):
So she's basically like a Disney princess here. Yes. Yeah,
the wild birds are landing in her lap and she's
treating them kindly.

Speaker 3 (01:15:04):
Like snow white. Yeah, bird's coming down land on the hand.
But in this conversation, Mara tells Johnny that he can
come see her where she works because she's gonna be
working later that day. You get the sense that he's
very excited to see her in mermaid mode, and so
later that day she takes him out to the pier
where she works, and they go to the Mermaid House
before it opens, where Johnny meets an older man that

(01:15:26):
Mara calls Sam. Sam is also known as Captain Murdoch.
This is Captain Sam Murdoch, a retired sea captain with
a British accent. He seems to be maybe sleeping off
a hangover behind the booth in front of the building.
Sam is the owner and operator of the Mermaid attraction,
and he sits out front of the building with a

(01:15:47):
megaphone running a spiel. He's like, come see the amazing
half woman, half fish. It's the thrill of a lifetime.
And we learn not in this scene, but we learn
later that Sam is not just Moraa's boss, he is
her a optive father. So when Sam and Johnny are
left alone, Mora goes to get dressed and Sam kind
of tries to bond with Johnny as they are both

(01:16:09):
men of the sea, but of course Johnny just started
being a man of the sea. And we learn in
this conversation that Sam was once in the English Navy.
After that he was captain of a private vessel, and
we find out eventually that it was while sailing the
world that he found a moura orphaned on an island
near Greece. I think they say the island of Mikonos,

(01:16:30):
and he adopted her and raised her there after. But
after a bit, Mora calls out to Johnny from inside.
She's like, I'm ready now, so Johnny has to come
see her. And Johnny goes into the darkened room around
the corner and he looks down into the tank and
there are sparkles reflecting the spotlights, and so there are
you know, reflected lights dancing up on the ceiling. And

(01:16:51):
Johnny looks down and he sees more inside and she
is beautiful, mesmerizing but haunting, and the music swells with
these these strange tones. And when he's looking down on her,
her eyes are closed, and there's this feeling that maybe
she could be dead, but you could see her, you
could see her moving ever so slightly, so you know
she's alive. She's combing her long, dark hair while she

(01:17:14):
lies there with the fishtail.

Speaker 2 (01:17:16):
Yeah, and so you know, this is the first scene
with the interior of the Mermaid Attraction where we can
already begin to contemplate this in a number of ways,
like the Mermaid as the object of desire and affection,
but also as desire itself, like it's desire taking on
this like strange form as it is imprisoned really and

(01:17:39):
also ultimately kind of entombed in this exhibit.

Speaker 3 (01:17:43):
Yeah, imprisoned behind glass in a ways, stuck in there
in a kind of suspended animation. Almost. The way she
looks like she's not fully alive inside is kind of
like listless, lethargic combing of the hair while being observed
by the people who pay money to come and look down.

Speaker 2 (01:18:00):
Yeah, so it's very much a specimen sort of display,
you know, going into this, I was I was imagining
up to this point that the Mermaid presentation would be
kind of like the Mermaid shows that you see in
various places, like the witchy watchy sort of thing. I've
never seen that, oh well, you know, the old fashioned
shows where you're generally going to be looking at a fish,
like a big fish tank or some sort of a
tank straight ahead, and there'll be women in Mermaid costumes

(01:18:24):
that are performers using like a breathing hose apparatus and
then swimming around, you know, very much alive, creating and
maybe even you know, as the ones I've seen before,
putting on some sort of a show like reenacting, like
The Little Mermaid that sort of thick some sort of
to the degree that you can truly act when you
have to breathe through a hose in between tanks. Right,
But it's not that it's not a live again. It

(01:18:47):
feels more like a specimen, almost like some sort of
a you know, a freak show sort of environment.

Speaker 3 (01:19:01):
So anyway, some time passes, we cut ahead and we
see Johnny and Mora are continuing their romance over the
following days. So they like each other more and more
and they are starting to fall in love. There's a
scene where they go to the beach together. They frolic
in the water and then they lie out in the sun.
There's a funny boat where they argue about whether you
can go swimming right after you eat. Johnny says no,

(01:19:23):
can't do it, it's dangerous, and Maura doesn't believe it. Rob,
do you have a ruling.

Speaker 2 (01:19:26):
On this as a swimmer, I mean, I generally don't
swim right after eating. I rarely think about it, just
because it rarely comes up as a possibility. But yeah,
I would probably have this if I were in Johnny's shoes,
I would probably have this moment where I'd be like,
is that true or is that a misnomer? And then
I'd probably have to research it.

Speaker 3 (01:19:47):
Well, Johnny has no such self doubt full confidence, you
can't do it. Mara tells Johnny about her relationship with Sam.
You know, this is where we learn that he found
her orphaned on the island of Mikonos. He raised her,
He's been like a father to her. And she says
she knows he's a strange man, but he's been good
to her. And then Johnny there apologizes for thinking poorly

(01:20:11):
of Sam at first and maybe saying some things that
kind of was like what's the sky's deal? But then
there's one part here, it's not the only part of
the movie like this, where suddenly she starts describing a
kind of mystical emotional relationship with the forces of nature,

(01:20:32):
and especially the ocean. So Mora lies back and she
feels the sun on her skin, and she says, I
love the sun and the moon and the stars, and
Johnny says, and the sea, and she says, yes, I
love the sea most of all. But I'm afraid of
it too. Johnny says, I guess we're all a little
afraid of what we love, and that moment seems a

(01:20:56):
little out of character for Johnny. I was like, what
is Johnny suddenly wise? But I think it actually it
scans the more I think about it, Like it makes sense.
It's an out of the mouths of babes comes wisdom
stuff like Johnny is not stupid, but he's not very experienced,
and he's not very wise about the world. It just
it just kind of feels like it's a thing he

(01:21:16):
says because it feels like a thing to say in
the moment, but actually there's a lot of truth to it,
and it's relevant to the story.

Speaker 2 (01:21:23):
And I think it's lived in as well, like he
he has experience already of being a little afraid of
the things that he loves that he feels desire towards.
And Yeah, this is just a beautiful line in the
film that really feels more or less like its thesis statement,
you know, and very very key to this contemplation on
love and desire in a world that may push you

(01:21:46):
in different directions.

Speaker 3 (01:21:47):
Yeah, totally, And I think there are multiple ways to
read it in which it's true. I mean, I think
you can say from Johnny's perspective. It's true, and it
makes sense because he's head over heels for Moura, but
also she's strange, Like he's already had these strange moments
where he feels like he doesn't really understand her, maybe
worries that he's never going to be able to understand her.

(01:22:08):
There's something different about her than she He's not on
her level. But then I would say the second thing
is the inevitable aspect of it. It's almost like a
self fulfilling statement, which is that anytime you love something,
you inevitably fear losing what you love, So like love
can't exist without fear, right right, Yeah, almost some kind

(01:22:29):
of Jedi sort of wisdom there.

Speaker 2 (01:22:32):
Yeah. And then also like the transformative nature of desire,
like if I get the thing that I desire, does
it change who I am? And yeah, does change who
you are? And that's life.

Speaker 3 (01:22:43):
So that night, Johnny and Maura go out listening to
music on the beach and Maura begins to dance to
the music. But in the middle of the performance, actually
quick aside, there are a couple of moments in Maura's
dance where it the dance as a whole is interesting
and cool. But there is a moment where it looks
like she's doing the robot. This seems very pre the

(01:23:04):
invention of the robot as the robot.

Speaker 2 (01:23:06):
But oh yeah, I don't know the full history on
the robot. When the robot was fully unveiled as a
dance move.

Speaker 3 (01:23:12):
I don't know either. But there's a couple of moves
that look like the robot. It's very transient. But then
while she's dancing in the middle of the performance, Johnny notices,
standing at a distance on the rocks in the dark
is the Sea Witch, the woman from the club, the
woman who confronted Maura before. And so she's out on
this rock and the wind is whipping at her silk

(01:23:33):
veil and she's making these intense eyes at them, and
the sea Witch appears to have some kind of power
over Maura. Maura sees her and then gasps with terror
and then collapses in the sand. Johnny goes to her
and helps her up, and he asks it was that woman,
wasn't it, And Mora says, what woman? More mystery is

(01:23:54):
Maura hiding something? Is Maura not aware herself? We don't
really know. After this, there is a scene where Johnny
hangs out with Ellen, who works downstairs in the Merry
Go Round, remember her, her grandfather, and their friend Madame Ramanovich,
the fortune teller, though she does not like to be
called that she's a chiromancer, so Madame Ramanovitch. This is

(01:24:18):
the scene where she goes on a rand against tea
bags because she says, you know, if everyone was using
these bags, I'd never be able to read anybody's tea leaves.
She also explains that she can read other people's fortunes,
but not her own. In this scene, it's very obvious
that Ellen is taken with Johnny. Like Johnny, She's kind

(01:24:39):
of looking up at him like, oh, isn't he dreamy?
But Johnny only has eyes for more. He seems to
not even notice that Ellen is interested in him, and
in this scene Johnny starts to get the first hints
of danger. There is a visit from a police detective
that leads to Ellen sharing gossip with Johnny, which is
that Mora's last two boyfriends both died under mysterious circumstances.

(01:25:04):
The line she says is a quote. In the past
two years, Mora had two boyfriends and they're both dead
now They were both nice boys. They went with her,
then suddenly they disappeared. A few days later, their bodies
were found washed up on shore, drowned. Now there's no
proof that Mara did anything wrong, but does seem suspicious,

(01:25:24):
doesn't it like two boyfriends in a row, both disappeared
and then showed up drowned. H and Ellen says, I
bet she didn't tell you about those boys, did she?
And no, she didn't tell him. Then the scene gets
even more interesting. The payphone at the other end of
the room rings. The old man answers it and then
calls to Johnny says it's for him. Johnny says, that's

(01:25:47):
funny because nobody knows I'm here. It's interesting. He goes
to answer it, but there's nobody there on the phone.
And then while he's standing at the phone, he looks
out the window and he sees down below on the
street the Sea Witch. She is walking briskly and she
goes around the corner, so Johnny runs off to follow her,

(01:26:07):
and he's trying to figure out who this woman is
and why she keeps bothering Moura. And this leads to
a very interesting sequence that this part to me felt
like film noir, the part where Johnny is following her
around town, going between these houses and over a wooden bridge,
past the railroad, tracks, under electrical pylons, and eventually into

(01:26:28):
this strange neighborhood that kind of looks like it's from
a different world. I don't know exactly how to describe
the weirdness of how this house looks, but they come
to this old house with shuttered windows that seems like
a kind of antique building. As Johnny goes around the corner,
he sees there's a rocking chair on the porch that
is rocking by itself with no one in it. Maybe

(01:26:50):
it's just rocking in the wind. There's a child holding
a doll standing in the road who doesn't speak, and
Johnny asks her did you see a woman go by here?
But the child just runs away.

Speaker 2 (01:27:00):
Yeah, he's far off the boardwalk at this point for sure, totally.

Speaker 3 (01:27:03):
And then Johnny finally realizes this house it is the
address that old Sam gave him, telling him to come
visit sometime. So Johnny approaches the door, he knocks, and
he goes in, and Sam is quite drunk and intent
on getting drunker, but he says, oh, you know, Johnny,
I'm glad you came. I've got something important to tell

(01:27:25):
you about. He's very jovial at first, but then he
starts to turn serious and he tells Johnny that he
is in grave danger from Maura. At first, he's vague
about it. He's talking about how Maura has a certain
compulsion which could put Johnny's life at risk, and Johnny's
trying to understand what he's talking about. He's like, are

(01:27:45):
you saying she's insane, that she's gonna hurt me? And
he's like, well, you know, not exactly that she's insane,
but take my word for it. You've got to break
off this acquaintance. And then he sends in a funny party,
sends Johnny to get another bottle of liquor for him,
and then starts telling telling the strange backstory behind a
severed hand he's got on the shelf.

Speaker 2 (01:28:07):
I really love this bit with the severed hand because
this is I mean, first of all, there's just like
the idea that this guy's just getting ripped on just
room temperature gin from the bottle. But then also to
the idea, like you quickly begin to realize Sam is
he is a collector, and he's not just a collector.

(01:28:29):
He's a collector of perhaps strange things or even dangerous things,
which we get from this hand that he has bottled
up there and preserved in the cabinet.

Speaker 3 (01:28:38):
A hand in a jar that I think, he says,
was given to him as a gift by the ruler
from some other nation who I think it was cut
from a thief. Yeah so Sam, But anyway, eventually he
gets around to the issue of Mara again. Sam says
to Johnny, you've read the Greek myths, haven't you. Johnny
has not. Sam asks Johnny if he's heard about the Sirens.

(01:29:02):
Johnny's like, maybe, sort of. Sam says the Sirens were
a strange race of sea people, half human, half creatures
of the sea. The female of the species were known
popularly as mermaids, women of the Sea. And then he
goes on to explain that the show they run on
the Pier where they have Maura as the mermaid is

(01:29:23):
a fake. It's an illusion. He says. You wouldn't believe
mermaids actually exist, would you. Johnny says no, he wouldn't
believe that. Then Sam says, let me tell you, young man,
that things happen in this world never dreamt of in
your philosophy? Where do you think myths come from? Do
you think they're just made up? No? They spring from truth,

(01:29:45):
ancient truth, living truth. Then, as he's getting drunker, Sam
he continues to talk, but he starts to become a
little less coherent and a little more kind of rambling
into different subjects. He starts saying, Maura, she lived with.
That was her room up there behind that door. I
found her on an island, but I didn't know what
she was to become. I didn't know she belonged to

(01:30:07):
that ancient race. She's a monster. I warned you. That's
all I can do. And he starts to pass out,
but Johnny's trying to get the information. It's like, wait
a minute, what about that woman who's been following Mara?
Does she live here? I saw her come here? And
Sam says, there isn't any woman. I'm all alone. Then
he passes out completely and Johnny climbs the stairs to

(01:30:28):
see Mora's old room and inside it's decorated like her
apartment with the sea stars and the shells. But this
window is hanging ominously open, with the wind rushing in
from the outside, blowing the curtains. Nothing really happens here,
but it's fabulously spooky.

Speaker 2 (01:30:44):
Yeah, almost a sense of cosmic horror, you know, like
trying to like discovering the sort of terrestrial like homeye
origin of Maura. But there's much more beyond that. It
just seems to like open up into the greater world,
even the void. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:31:02):
So, eventually Johnny confronts Mara about what Sam said to him,
and her reaction is so strange. Mora says, no, she
did not hurt her previous boyfriends, but she also says,
it's true they're waiting for me to join them. So
she actually believes the part about her being one of

(01:31:22):
the people of the sea. She thinks that she must
belong to the sirens in some way and they are
calling to her. Johnny tells her he doesn't believe it.
He's like, that can't be true. You're confused about that,
And Moras says to Johnny, quote, you Americans have such
a simple view of the world. You think that everything
can be seen and touched and weighed and measured. You

(01:31:44):
think you discovered reality, but you don't even know what
it is. And Johnny asks Okay, if it's true that
you're one of the people of the sea, how do
you know? And then Mora says, and I love this part,
she says, because I feel the sea water in my veins,
because I listened to the roar of the sea, and
it speaks to me like a mother's voice. The tide

(01:32:05):
pulls at my heart. The face of the moon fills
my soul with a strange longing. So I think we
can step back and be a little more summary about
the rest of the movie. You know, this is a
little past the halfway point here, but for the rest
of the story, Johnny is really in a difficult position
where he I feel like for Johnny it would be

(01:32:26):
he's not so afraid of Maura because part of him
trusts her, but he's really so like if it had
just been Sam and the other people warning him, like
her previous boyfriend's disappeared, you know, you got to protect yourself,
that would be one thing. He could probably ignore that,
But I feel like he's really shaken by the fact

(01:32:46):
that Mora seems to believe it herself, and he doesn't
know how to deal with this.

Speaker 2 (01:32:51):
Yeah, in very much a sense that he is perhaps
over his head at least, I don't know. If not emotionally,
then it just we're I guess we're we're we've entered
a complex phase of the relationship, definitely. It's a it's
complicated level of the relationship here.

Speaker 3 (01:33:09):
Yeah. So there is a scene where Johnny's trying to
understand what happens, and he goes to visit Madame Madame Romanovitch,
the tarot reader, and he gets a reading where she
warns him of many different kinds of different dangers. I
don't remember everything exactly, she says, but she explains the
whole like they do a full explanation of like the

(01:33:30):
tarot layout. You know, here's what's here, here's what's across you,
here's what's behind in front of you. Remember, the hanged
man plays a significant role.

Speaker 2 (01:33:38):
And she mentioned something we mentioned before on the show.
I think that the hanged man is a it comes
from a place of serenity and wisdom and so forth.
So she's yeah, the tarot sequence, and I'm no expert
on taro. It feels very authentic and well well written out.

Speaker 3 (01:33:53):
There's also a scene later which I think is not
super significant to the plot, but it's just a scene
where Johnny goes to a bathhouse and happens to run
into Sam who's they're getting a massage later. Some reviewers
have singled this out just because they read it as
including intentional a sort of queer coded or homo erotic
jokes in there, Like there's a joke about a masseewer

(01:34:15):
talking about like, oh, I'll pound you later.

Speaker 2 (01:34:19):
Yeah. Yeah, this is often singled out, but it is
again not like super important to the plot, but it
is also very well shot. You get the steam, oh yeah,
you know, and there's exposed flesh. It does create this. Yes,
it has a fascinating vibe. So it is interesting to
sort of like, you can't help but take this and

(01:34:39):
to some degree sort of factor it into the film's
overall exploration of desire.

Speaker 3 (01:34:44):
Yeah, it does definitely have effective spooky elements. But yeah,
I think also it seems people think that Harrington was
just trying to get some in jokes in.

Speaker 2 (01:34:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:35:02):
Now, there's there's a really freaky scene later on where
where Johnny comes home and he has a nightmare that
he's like imagining kissing Maura, but then she's turning into
a mermaid, and then she goes even further and suddenly
he's having some kind of liaison with an octopus.

Speaker 2 (01:35:19):
Yeah. Yeah, and it's pretty good. It's like, this is
not like when Bella Lagosi wrestled that octopus. It looks
looks creepy, and there's a lot of tension to it.
A great nightmare slash dream sequence, to be sure, and
certainly the most monstery this film gets.

Speaker 3 (01:35:34):
Yeah, there's also a scene where Johnny wakes up and
discovers Maura having stepped out of the bathtub and wandered
out of the apartment in the night, and he follows
her wet footsteps on the ground trying to figure out
what's going on, and she's like down under the pier,
having gone walking into the water, and now she's up
out in.

Speaker 2 (01:35:53):
The waves coming in.

Speaker 3 (01:35:55):
Yeah. Oh, so it's a frightening scene and so like
you can tell they're both overwhelmed. They don't really understand
what's going on. Johnny doesn't fully believe that she's a siren,
but maybe he doesn't know what to believe.

Speaker 2 (01:36:08):
So much of this too, though, it just feels so
authentic to like what it's like to like you enter
into some sort of early relationship and you reach that
point where you have to realize that the other person
is indeed another person that's pulled by their own different
motivations and desires and things within and outside of their control,

(01:36:30):
and the overwhelming feeling you might get from that, you know.
So there's so much of this film that just works
on a very relatable level without even getting into the
heavier stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:36:40):
That's true, You're right like that. I think a lot
of people have this early realization. It's like the first
time it ever happens to them in their life that
they realize, oh, you're dating somebody, and it's like either
their problems are also your problems or you just can't
stay together, like and you know, like you gotta yeah,

(01:37:03):
and so so clearly something like that is going on there,
and he's Johnny is he does He's not doing this
from a malicious place, but he's also like he doesn't
know how to process this stuff. So like a couple
of times he's just trying to get her to forget
all about it and move on.

Speaker 2 (01:37:20):
He's not getting a lot of great help from anyone
else either, to be clear, Like other people have been like, hey,
I think she might be a murderer, might want to
be careful about that relationship, you know, including her father.
So you know, he's I feel like, in a way,
he's doing the best he can with like zero support
from you know, other humans outside of the relationship.

Speaker 3 (01:37:41):
That's right. But eventually we get to a climactic scene
where she decides that she needs to go out diving.
She wants to go out scuba diving, and she wants
Johnny to come with her, and so there will be
a big twist coming here. They go out on a
boat and they swim down to a reef and while
they are under the water, Johnny is looking at something

(01:38:02):
on the reef. He's got his mask on and he's
got his breathing apparatus, and Maura comes up behind him
with a knife and she's menacing him with this knife.
Now she doesn't kill him. It seems maybe she's meaning
to do something, but she stops herself or I think
she does, like his breathing hose gets cut or disconnected

(01:38:24):
in some way. Yeah, And I think I couldn't tell exactly,
like does she cut his breathing hose?

Speaker 2 (01:38:29):
That's what I took from it. Yeah, I think the
scenario is they go out to go scuba diving, and
he's already like, do we really need to go that
deep to see some neat stuff? You know, which I
think is a reasonable question to ask. And she's like,
oh no, there's the beautiful stuff down there. So they
go down there. She cuts the air hose and then
that forces him back up. This kind of like forcing
this separation between the two of them. You can see

(01:38:50):
a sort of like two fold like sort of like
pushing him beyond his boundaries in an attempt to force
him away from her, and then like then being more
direct with it, you know, this is where I belong,
this is not where you belong, and pushing him away.

Speaker 3 (01:39:03):
She has to stay below and he stays above so
she doesn't stab him. So you see, you could interpret
it different ways. What happens there when she cuts his hose,
Like yeah, but he goes he has to swim back
up to the boat and then he's in the boat
and so he's like she coming up? Is she gonna
he can't go back down because his hose doesn't work anymore? Uh,

(01:39:25):
And then she never comes up. So what has happened
to her? I think her fate is ambiguous for a
time until Johnny goes after he gets back to shore,
he goes back to the Mermaid House, the attraction on
the pier and haunting, a terrifying scene. He goes inside
and finds her body dead in the mermaid display.

Speaker 2 (01:39:48):
Yeah, she was already presented kind of like a corpse
under there anyway, and now it seems that she is
indeed a corpse beneath the glass. And this leads to
just a phenomenal scene, great drama, great symbolism, building on
these ideas of alienation and uh yeah, the exhibit is
is now, you know, not merely a prison at all,

(01:40:10):
but also a tomb. And Sam here confronts him with
a gun, and so here we get into some like
some real tension and some confrontation.

Speaker 3 (01:40:18):
That's right. I didn't make this connection when I was
watching it, actually, but when you said that this prison
the tank has become a tomb, it reminded me of
like actual glass coffins in the world, like the tomb
of Linen or whatever, you know, or people go up
and look at a body preserved.

Speaker 2 (01:40:33):
In beauty even yeah, yeah, or snow white. Which one
is it that ye bites the apple? Yeah, and is
under sometimes depicted as being under class.

Speaker 3 (01:40:41):
Yeah, but anyway, Yeah, so he goes and looks and
Johnny is distraught but also distraught. Now, yes, is Sam
the father who comes in with a gun?

Speaker 2 (01:40:50):
He can you killed her? Yes?

Speaker 3 (01:40:52):
Yes, uh, And there's this confrontation. He begins shooting, but
there's a struggle, and eventually the police arrive, Like there's
some policemen outside, they hear the shooting. They come inside
and Sam is arrested, and that leads into kind of
like the Alfred Hitchcock movie Psycho, we get a post
arrest kind of explanation scene, except in this movie it

(01:41:14):
comes directly from Sam himself, who confesses and explains what happened.
So his confession is essentially that as he grew up
raising Mora, and as much as she needed him initially
he was a father figure to her, he realizes also

(01:41:34):
that he needs her and it was one of those
cases where he just really couldn't accept that she was
going to have to grow up and live her own
life and live her life separate from him, and I
think he just wanted to continue always being her father
and sort of being the only person in her life

(01:41:55):
and her being the person in his life, and so
he decided, as a way of sabotage all other future relationships,
that he was going to implant this idea on her
that she was one of the sea.

Speaker 2 (01:42:07):
People, and so he essentially like raised her to have
this strange worldview where she sees herself as a mermaid
whose bound return to the sea and can never have
like a no true human love, that sort of thing,
which is, you know, pretty monstrous. But then he also
has he confesses that he killed her two previous boyfriends

(01:42:27):
as well, so that that was him as well. So
he does get Johnny off the hook for that, but yeah,
confesses to those murders.

Speaker 3 (01:42:37):
But there's a twist. He confesses to all that, and
so Johnny's like, so, who was the woman that you
had as part of this scheme?

Speaker 2 (01:42:45):
Yeah, Johnny's present for this scene as well, So don't
you know, I don't know how much how realistic this
is in terms of police work, but you know works dramatically.

Speaker 3 (01:42:53):
Who was the woman that you had pretending to be
the queen of the Sirens, the sea witch that was
calling her back to the And Sam's like, there wasn't
any woman. Now, the police try to explain that to
Johnny they're like, don't worry about the Johnny. He's just
protecting his accomplices. You know, we'll figure out who his
accomplices were eventually. But I think it's the audience were

(01:43:14):
there to wonder like who was that?

Speaker 2 (01:43:17):
Really?

Speaker 3 (01:43:18):
Is human accomplice or is there something else going on,
Like are we actually getting the full story now through
this confession or is that some kind of misdirection too.

Speaker 2 (01:43:28):
Yeah, I got the impression that this is left here
to leave the hatch open for the mystery, so that
even though we have had this almost kind of like
Scooby doing moment here where the killer's mask is revealed
and he fesses up to everything, but this one thing
cannot be explained, and by not being able to explain
the mystery woman, it leaves open the possibility that, yes,

(01:43:50):
maybe she was actually one of the sea people, maybe
she was bound to return to the sea, and leaving
all of these dreamlike and mysterious supernatural aspects of the
film very much in play, because I think it would
that have would have been disappointing if we'd reached the
end and everything that felt dreamlike and superstitious was just

(01:44:10):
completely explained away, just completely Scooby Dude at the end.
This way we keep that mystery alive.

Speaker 3 (01:44:17):
I agree. I like it that some questions are left unanswered.
I mean I tend to like endings like that. I
know some people get very annoyed when there are questions
that are left unanswered at the end, but I almost
always prefer that as long as it doesn't feel like
you're just getting jerked around to no kind of planned resolution.
You know, you want some important resolution but also some

(01:44:39):
mystery to remain. That's kind of my sweet spot.

Speaker 2 (01:44:41):
Yeah, give me something to think about and contemplate later on.

Speaker 3 (01:44:44):
But you know, I think it's not just the presence
of the Sea Witch that leaves some things kind of mysterious.
I do think we're still to wonder like what explained,
Like why did Mourra cut Johnny's air hose, Like what
exactly was happening there? Her understanding of what she was
doing there? Yeah, I don't know. I think I think

(01:45:06):
there are other tensions. But then, as we've mentioned, uh,
you know, throughout there is this other character Ellen who
kind of appears there at the end and is like,
you know, he just making her presence known, Like, Hey, Johnny,
I'm still around.

Speaker 2 (01:45:20):
Yeah, yeah, I hear your single. Now, so, hey, do
you want to get you a coke float sometime or something?
And yeah, so we get the sense that they are
going to begin a relationship. Now, is it a true
happy ending sort of scenario here, I don't. I don't
know that that's necessarily the case. There seems to be

(01:45:40):
a compromise here, and you know, his his true desire
and his true love has has been lost, and this
is very much, very much a diversion. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:45:51):
Yeah, I don't see it as a happy ending. I
see clearly like we have established Sam as the villain
of the story, a complicated villain, but the villain of
the story behind all of the loss and the suffering
and the manipulation of Mora that led to her death.
But despite the fact that the villain has been caught
and has confessed, it still doesn't feel resolved, if that

(01:46:12):
makes sense.

Speaker 2 (01:46:13):
Yeah, absolutely, yeah, and that the air of tragedy remains.

Speaker 3 (01:46:16):
Yeah. Okay, Well that was Curtis Harrington's Night Tide. I
stand up for this one. I think this is a
really interesting, really cool movie. Gives you a Dennis Hopper
unliked any Dennis Hopper I'd ever seen before. I like
the acting across the board really, Linda Lawson is great,
a strong script, a good good directing hand by Harrington

(01:46:40):
makes me want to read Harrington's book. And yeah, bravo,
bravo do all involved. I liked it.

Speaker 2 (01:46:45):
Yeah, absolutely definitely worth checking out. All right, we're going
to go and close out this episode of Weird House Cinema.
But we'll just remind everyone out there that Stuffed to
Bow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast
with core episodes and Tuesdays and Thursdays, but on Fridays,
with set aside most serious concerns to just talk about
a weird film here on Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 3 (01:47:05):
If you run.

Speaker 2 (01:47:05):
Letterbox dot com, look us up there, we're Weird House.
We have a nice list of all the movies that
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(01:47:25):
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Speaker 3 (01:47:35):
Here's thanks, as always to our excellent audio producer Jjposway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:47:56):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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