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Any number of well-regarded actors in Tinsletown have lent their names and talents to horror and sci-fi films, and a few of them made rather a career of it. One such actor may surprise you--Mel Ferrer. Yes, Mel Ferrer. For, despite his fame as an "old school" type of leading man, Mel Ferrer has been seen in quite a few frightful and fantastic films. This will be made evident as we inventory...
By HARVEY F. CHARTRAND A case can be made that actor Mel Ferrer is an Uncrowned Prince of Horror Cinema. Best known for his roles as the lame puppeteer in the musical Lili (1953) and Prince Andrei Bolkonsky in War And Peace (1956), the tall and patrician Ferrer spent much of the sixties abroad, often starring in European horror productions, including the classic lesbian vampire movie Blood And Roses (1961). He then returned to the States to lend his aristocratic bearing to such American exploitationers as Tobe Hooper’s Eaten Alive (1977) and Howard Avedis’ The Fifth Floor (1979).
Ferrer also produced two excellent thrillers: Wait Until Dark (1967), with then-wife Audrey Hepburn as a blind lady tormented by a gang of thieves in her Manhattan apartment, and The Night Visitor (1971), with Max von Sydow as a mental asylum inmate hell-bent on revenge. Ferrer has worked with great directors such as Fritz Lang, Jean Renoir, Henry King, Henri Verneuil and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, but he has also lent his name to some of the worst dreck ever committed to film. In the seventies, Ferrer appeared in several Italian-made horror cheapies that provided a quick paycheck but did little to enhance his reputation.
Tracing Ferrer’s history in outré films, we start with The World, The Flesh and The Devil in 1959. Set in an abandoned New York City, this apocalyptic story addresses the tensions between three survivors of a Third World War that has seemingly evaporated all human beings, leaving no traces of the millions who once lived there. Ferrer, Harry Belafonte and Inger Stevens play the survivors. Based on M.P. Shiel’s 1901 novel The Purple Cloud, The World, the Flesh and the Devil fails to live up to its intriguing first half-hour, a tour of deserted Manhattan streetscapes. The plot eventually bogs down into a turgid account of the sexual rivalry of two men (one white, one black) for one white woman. These three people caught in the ultimate eternal triangle may well be the last human beings left on Earth--yet the interracial angle dominates the storyline, eclipsing the end-of-the-world scenario. However, Ferrer is terrific as the villainous blueblood who wants the luscious Stevens all to himself.
Ferrer then turns up as the love object of a young lady (Annette Stroyberg) who is actually a vampire, in Roger Vadim’s Blood And Roses, based on J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s oft-filmed short story Carmilla. Noted film critic David Del Valle has nothing but praise for Blood and Roses, citing it as the finest adaptation of the tale. He writes: "For those not familiar with this novella, it is basically the female version of Dracula with a distinct lesbian subtext. The film is glorious. The photography by Claude Renoir and the music, very 16th-century, make Blood And Roses a classic." Ferrer is an agreeable and attractive presence as the stalked nobleman Leopoldo De Karnstein.
In the third remake of The Hands Of Orlac (1961), Ferrer is effectively cast as concert pianist Stephen Orlac, whose life goes to hell after his hands are badly burned in a plane crash. Surgeons tell him they saved his hands, but the unhinged Orlac believes the doctors used him for a transplant experiment, grafting onto him the hands of a freshly executed serial strangler. Orlac’s new hands start to take on a life of their own. A seedy magician suspects what is happening and tries to blackmail Orlac.
The image of a sweaty Ferrer screaming, while holding up hands encased in giant plaster casts, is one you won’t soon forget. The Hands Of Orlac is not great cinema, but it has a period charm and benefits from an earnest performance by Ferrer, although Christopher Lee is over-the-top as the sleazeball magician. We skip ahead to 1974. Ferrer is cast against type as a Roman businessman in The Antichrist, one of a slew of Exorcist knock-offs produced in Italy at this time. Ferrer plays the weak-willed father of Hipolita (Carla Gravina), a partially paralyzed young woman with serious mental problems stemming from the death of her mother. The intervention of a well-meaning psychologist leads Hipolita to remember her past life as a witch during the Inquisition. Eventually, Hipolita becomes possessed by the Devil and starts seducing and killing local men. An exorcism performed by an Austrian monk (George Coulouris) is the only way to stop the madness.
The restored Anchor Bay version of The Antichrist is generally conceded to be the best Exorcist imitation, boasting stylish visuals shot in Rome, startling color schemes and a very weird score by Ennio Morricone and Bruno Nicolai. And now, the pièce de résistance--Tobe Hooper’s Eaten Alive, the first of two reptilian features that Ferrer appeared in during the tacky decade of the 1970s. Ferrer poignantly portrays Harvey Wood, the dying father of a missing girl, whose investigation into her unexplained disappearance takes him to a swampview motel and a grisly fate at the hands of insane motelkeeper Judd (Neville Brand).
Judd hacks Wood to pieces with a scythe and feeds him to the pet crocodile he keeps caged up in the back. This variation on a favorite theme of Hooper’s – a raving lunatic’s slaughter of hapless passersby – is enjoying a critical reappraisal and is now viewed as a worthy follow-up to the director’s 1974 masterpiece The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Brand achieves screen immortality as the wacko innkeeper, far more obviously demented than the seemingly harmless motel manager Norman Bates of Psycho fame. Ferrer returned to Europe to take on the role of a university professor in The Girl In The Yellow Pajamas (1977), an ingenious giallo starring Ray Milland as a retired detective searching for the killer of a young woman found dead on the beach, wearing only a pair of yellow pajamas; meanwhile, a sexually adventurous friend of the deceased seems to be headed down the same path to victimhood – or is she? The Girl In The Yellow Pajamas is genuinely spooky, with a show-stopping twist ending that I guarantee you will not see coming.
Ferrer next essays the role of a psychiatrist who wrongfully commits a disco dancer (Dianne Hull) to The Fifth Floor (1978), a psycho-ward teeming with crazies and harboring a predatory orderly, chillingly portrayed by cowboy actor Bo Hopkins. The girl’s stay ends up being prolonged and no one – not even her adoring fiancée – believes her cries for help. Hull’s character fears that unless she stops at nothing to make her escape, she may become a truly broken woman, trapped in the locked ward forever. The Fifth Floor is actually based on a true story! Ferrer then co-starred in The Visitor (1979), an odd fusion of science fiction and the occult. A genetically perfect woman (Joanne Nail) who refuses to father a child by Satan (Lance Hendriksen) is abducted by a UFO and artificially inseminated by a horde of alien devil worshippers! Ferrer again plays a doctor. This Italian production, aimed at capitalizing on the success of The Omen and Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, was filmed in Georgia! Somehow, a great cast of silver screen veterans (including Ferrer, Glenn Ford, John Huston, Shelley Winters and Sam Peckinpah) agreed to appear in this mishmash.
The tagline for Island Of The Fishmen (1979) was: "They're men turned inside out! And worse... they're still alive!" Ferrer plays a 19th-century treasure hunter visiting a cursed island in hopes of finding gold. He is killed off way too early by the island’s denizens – the titular mutations created by mad doctor Joseph Cotten, whose experiments are bankrolled by a greedy tycoon (Richard Johnson) intent on using the creatures to dive for treasure in the nearby sunken ruins of Atlantis. Is that crazy enough for you? 1979 was a busy year for Ferrer. He had a lead role as Mr. Joshua, the unscrupulous owner of an African resort in Sergio Martino’s The Great Alligator. Ferrer and co-stars Barbara Bach and Claudio Cassinelli are at the mercy of a huge man-eating crocodile--the incarnation of a native god angered by the tourists’ intrusion on its sacred nesting grounds. As they attempt to escape back to civilization, pursued by angry tribes and a giant reptile, Joshua comes to a deplorable end--a flaming arrow pierces his gut.
In Umberto Lenzi’s Eaten Alive/Emerald Jungle (1980), Ferrer has an extended cameo as an anthropologist who examines documentary footage of a doomed expedition to New Guinea. The fate of its members at the hands of cannibals is shown in graphic detail. People are hung up on hooks by their skin. There was a vogue for such grisly fare in Italy at the time, sparked by the unexpected worldwide success of Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust (1980). Ferrer caps his career in horror playing an army general in Lenzi’s City Of The Living Dead (1980), the umpteenth attempt to cash in on George Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead. Lenzi’s cheap zombie gorefest (aka Nightmare City and Invasion By The Atomic Zombies) has somehow managed to achieve cult status over the years among legions of Eurohorror cinephiles.
Okay, so Mel Ferrer is no King of Horror like Vincent Price or even Robert Quarry. Yet due to his many appearances in macabre films and sheer longevity in show business (his career spanned 60 years--from 1940 to 2000), Ferrer deserves to be considered a true Crown Prince of the Horror Realm. Thanks, Harv. Mel Ferrer may not be known for his roles in horror and sci-fi films, but he certainly appeared in a goodly (ghouly?) number of them. His performances always graced a good film and made even the worst of schlock more bearable to watch. He is definitely one of the last of the Hollywood greats and we certainly have no objection to adding him to the Horror Film Hall of Fame. Article copyright © Harvey F. Chartrand |
