Stuart Whitman is a pretty familiar face for those of us who enjoy the films of yore.  But it's not a face that most of us associate with horror and shock films.  Yet, perhaps we should, at least a little, since he appeared in nearly two dozen of them.  Surprised?  You won't be after you read the following, which highlights...

By HARVEY F. CHARTRAND

Stuart Whitman once seemed destined for major stardom. The rugged and handsome actor had a talent for portraying tough and vulnerable characters. Working his way up the Hollywood ladder from uncredited bit parts in the 1951 sci-fi classics When Worlds Collide and The Day The Earth Stood Still, Whitman landed good roles in big movies like Darby’s Rangers (1958), The Sound And the Fury (1959), The Comancheros (1961) and The Longest Day (1962). Alfred Hitchcock screen-tested Whitman for the Sam Loomis role in Psycho (1960), but John Gavin got the part.

In what turned out to be the high point of his career, Whitman was nominated for a Best Actor Academy Award for his portrayal of a child molester in The Mark (1961), a role that Richard Burton turned down. Could it be that this gutsy acting choice jinxed Whitman’s career?

Though he continued to work almost without let-up until retiring from the screen in 2000, Whitman was increasingly relegated to B-movies from the mid-sixties on. The brawny, craggy-faced and thick-browed leading man often appeared in cheap actioners shot in exotic locations in Europe, Asia and Latin America.

We at HORROR-WOOD are most interested in Whitman’s numerous entries in the field of horror. His first foray into the macabre is Shock Treatment (1964). Whitman plays a professional actor hired to fake madness so he can gain admission to a mental hospital and find out where a homicidal inmate (Roddy McDowall) hid one million dollars.

During his quest, Whitman is subjected to electro-shock therapy and injections of psychotropic drugs, to the point where he questions his own sanity. There seemed to be a vogue for "psychiatric-ward pictures" at the time, for Shock Treatment followed in the wake of The Caretakers (1963), Shock Corridor (1963) and Strait-Jacket (1964).

In the 1971 made-for-TV movie Revenge, Whitman plays a cop investigating the disappearance of Bradford Dillman, kidnapped by crazy Shelley Winters, an obsessive mother intent on avenging her daughter’s rape. Dillman--the man Winters believes is the rapist – is locked inside a cage in the basement of her isolated house. Revenge benefits from excellent performances by the three leads and a classy script by Joseph Stefano (Psycho, The Outer Limits).

In 1972, Whitman guest starred in two episodes of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery. In "Lindemann’s Catch," he portrays a cold-hearted sea captain, who captures a mermaid and tries to keep her alive. In Fright Night, a middle-aged couple (Whitman and Barbara Anderson) inherit a farmhouse and are terrified when the attic trunk they are told never to open starts moving all by itself. Both episodes of this memorable anthology series are enjoyable concoctions of "horror light."

That same year, Whitman teamed up with Gena Rowlands in "The Concrete Captain," a scary episode of Ghost Story, a supernatural anthology series hosted by Sebastian Cabot (Twice-Told Tales). "The Concrete Captain" was scripted by Hammer Films’ Jimmy Sangster. Sadly, the consistently excellent Ghost Story (which featured some of Hollywood’s biggest names of that era) lasted but one season.

Whitman and Psycho’s Janet Leigh portray married scientists in Night Of The Lepus (1972), certainly the nadir of both their careers and one of the most ridiculous films ever made. Ecological horror movies (Frogs, No Blade Of Grass, Soylent Green, Phase IV) were big box office in the early seventies. Shot quickly to cash in on this trend, Night Of The Lepus pits humanity against a rampaging horde of giant killer bunny rabbits (not jackrabbits), running amok in the Arizona desert.

This film is so bad it’s bad, wasting a fine cast that includes DeForest Kelley in his most embarrassing performance. Whitman plays a take-charge kind of guy who constantly oversteps his authority and often doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I shall refrain from heaping any further Mystery Science Theatre 3000-style derision on Night of the Lepus. Suffice to say that it is a must to avoid.

In Curtis Harrington’s made-for-TV movie The Cat Creature (1973), Whitman is cast as Lt. Marco, a brusque police detective investigating a string of homicides seemingly triggered by the defacing of an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus. This clever tribute to the understated horror of Val Lewton features an outstanding cast of "scream veterans" from the 1940s – John Carradine, Kent Smith, Gale Sondergaard, John Abbott and Keye Luke. The nail-biter of a screenplay was penned by Robert Bloch (author of the novel Psycho).

Whitman is next seen in a tertiary role as a clueless cop in Welcome to Arrow Beach/Tender Flesh (1974), a strictly low-grade horror effort that was actor/director Laurence Harvey's swan song. Casting himself in the lead role of Jason Henry--the silver screen’s first flesh-eating hero--Harvey edited Welcome To Arrow Beach from his deathbed, which might account for the film’s sloppiness and incoherence.

No sooner does Whitman’s Deputy Rakes announce that he will find out the truth behind a series of beachfront murders than he disappears from the story. Perhaps Whitman’s character was murdered in a scene deleted from the final edit. Or maybe Deputy Rakes was simply deemed redundant and written out of the story, as it is John Ireland’s Sheriff Duke Bingham character who dominates the final scenes.

Whitman plays yet another incompetent law enforcement officer in Tobe Hooper’s cult favorite Eaten Alive (1976). His Sheriff Martin is slow to discover why so many people are disappearing in the bayou near the Starlight Motel, owned by crazy old Neville Brand, who keeps a pet alligator chained up in the bog behind his property. Could the giant, vicious and voracious reptile somehow be connected with these missing persons’ cases? The macho Sheriff Martin never seems to make the link, preferring to hit on the young lady who’s in town searching for her missing sister.

One 1976 film for Whitman that was not a horror film (although some posters indicated it was), entitled Strange Shadows In An Empty Room, actually provided Whitman the chance to play Dirty Harry, albeit in the streets of Italy, where it was filmed.

Whitman again worked with Curtis Harrington in Ruby (1977), a weird tale of gangsters, ghosts and devil possession set at a remote swampview drive-in theatre. Whitman plays Piper Laurie’s boyfriend; she’s a former gangster’s moll haunted by the dead man’s ghost. Ruby is probably the best film Whitman made in the 1970s and he is excellent in it. Unfortunately, producer Steve Krantz severely recut the picture (hiring another director to shoot expository scenes). Only the bowdlerized, Alan Smithee-directed version of Ruby was available until the film was restored (save for a few lost scenes) for the Director’s Cut DVD released in 2001.

Whitman has a great supporting role as a slimy gambler in the western-horror epic The White Buffalo (1977), which pits a troubled Wild Bill Hickok (Charles Bronson) against a quasi-mythical beast terrorizing the American Northwest. The White Buffalo is enjoying a belated critical reappraisal and is now considered a triumph of magic realism. The build-up to the final confrontation with the supernatural creature is a white-knuckler.  Another film from 1977, Maniac, was marketed as a horror film but really told a ho-hum tale of an Indian killing rich people and demanding extortion money.

In Guyana: Crime Of The Century (aka Guyana: Cult Of The Damned), Whitman delivers a performance etched in evil as the Reverend James Johnson, who exhorted 900 of his followers to commit mass suicide in a squalid shantytown he built for them in South America. Johnson is of course based on the Reverend Jim Jones. Names were apparently changed to protect the guilty.

This version of the story leads us to believe that the rabid and fanatical Reverend James was terminally ill and wanted to take every one of his benighted followers down with him. Those who could not be convinced to quaff poisoned Kool-Aid were killed outright when they dared to question the reverend’s sanity.

In The Monster Club (1980)--an Amicus Productions film based on three stories by horrormeister R. Chetwynd- Hayes--Whitman is cast as Sam, a gruff film director scouting locations in a foggy, spooky town inhabited by cannibals and ghouls. Although this is the best episode of the three and manages to generate some decent suspense as Sam tries to escape from the cursed backwater, The Monster Club is a dreadful film, utterly lacking in any of the style and charm of old Amicus offerings like Asylum (1972) and From Beyond The Grave (1973).

In 1981, Whitman guest starred in an episode of Tales Of The Unexpected entitled The Boy Who Talked With Animals. The magisterial John Houseman (Ghost Story) hosted this horror/thriller TV series filmed in England.

Slumming again, Whitman is cast as an Irish priest in Demonoid: Messenger Of Death/Macabra (1981). His Father Cunningham tries to help Samantha Eggar in her battle against a demon that possesses its victims’ left hands, forcing them to commit hideous crimes. Whitman’s acting is suitably over-the-top for this ghastly high-camp Mexican horror travesty. It’s clear that at this point in his career, Whitman didn’t care anymore. Offered nothing but crummy scripts, he invested as much energy into a picture as he figured it deserved. Whitman’s Irish brogue is hit-and-miss.

By now, his shrewd investments had made him a millionaire one hundred times over. So with his cinematic glory years behind him, Whitman globetrots, appearing almost exclusively in B-pictures unworthy of his considerable talent. Yet even though he doesn’t need the money, Whitman must at some level need the work, as he travels to exotic locations to film one lousy picture after another.

Whitman next turns up in Horror Safari (1981) as a hard-living and heavy-drinking soldier of fortune holed up in the Philippines. Several unkind critics have noted that Whitman’s onscreen drunkenness appears to be genuine. Who can say? Whitman leads a team into the jungle to unearth millions in lost Japanese gold, hidden in a cave since the waning days of the Second World War. To reach the cave, the expedition must pass through cannibal-infested jungles. Despite a cast featuring Edmund Purdom and Harold Sakata, Horror Safari is one of the worst adventure flicks ever made.

Whitman’s next horror project is the rarely seen Vultures (1983). A wealthy patriarch summons his relatives to his deathbed, setting in motion a series of gory murders. Whitman is cast against type as a Mexican named Carlos Garcia; he is the lover of the dying patriarch’s sister (Yvonne De Carlo) and also the lead suspect in the gruesome murders of the old man’s greedy relatives (the vultures of the title).

Whitman is once again cast as an ineffectual sheriff in the mediocre slasher pic Deadly Intruder (1985), featuring former child star Danny Bonaduce in a supporting role. Bonaduce gets his head smashed through a TV screen and other cardboard characters die equally horrible deaths. The less said about Deadly Intruder, the better.

Whitman then lands a substantial role in Treasure Of The Amazon (1985) as a hard-ass gringo adventurer who knows his way around the Brazilian jungle. For a 61-year-old man, Whitman was still in pretty good shape and not afraid to doff his shirt. The old gringo even gets it on with a much younger babe. This Mexican gorefest--about a group of reprobates searching the horrifying depths of the Amazon jungle for diamonds and gold--has a few harrowing scenes, notably one in which a paralyzed man’s eyes are devoured by hungry crustaceans.

In 1985, Whitman guest stars in The Madness Room, an episode of the superior horror TV series Tales from the Darkside, co-produced by the old zombie wrangler himself,George Romero. Definitely a step up for Whitman in the quality department.

Whitman has a supporting role in Stillwatch (1987), a TV-movie starring Lynda Carter as a television journalist who moves into the house in Washington, D.C., where she lived as a child in the early 1950s and where her father murdered her mother and tried to kill her. Whitman plays an old friend of the family who reveals secrets from the mysterious past.

In 1992, Whitman guest starred as the head of security for a film studio in "Incident in Lot #7," an episode of the TV series Murder She Wrote. What makes this worthy of mention in HORROR-WOOD is that the murder being investigated by mystery novelist Jessica Fletcher (Angela Lansbury) was committed in the old Psycho house on the Universal backlot. So this episode of Murder She Wrote was about as "scary" as the mystery series ever got.

While his scenes were being shot near the old studio landmark, did Whitman wonder what might have been had Hitchcock picked him instead of John Gavin to play Sam Loomis in Psycho? It’s strange that so many Psycho connections seem to thread Whitman’s career.  (The closest Whitman ever came to playing a "psycho" was in 1964 when he starred in Signpost To Murder with Joanne Woodward.)

Whitman’s last theatrical horror credit to date is Sandman (1993), notable for the still unexplained death of its director/writer/star Eric Woster on the very day the film finished principal photography. Sandman’s story concerns a young family who move into a house built on an ancient cemetery, which serves as a gateway to unspeakable horrors of the past. Whitman plays the spirit of a man who lived in the house in the Fifties.

Strangely enough, Woster actually turned up dead in the house the day filming wrapped. One wonders if some scenes later went missing as the film was assembled, because so much of the convoluted time travel story just doesn't make any sense. Why the house is so evil is never fully explained. Nor is there even a character named "Sandman" in the film!

Stuart Whitman may have done a ton of junk in his 49-year career before the cameras, but when he really cared about a script, he proved yet again that his nomination for a Best Actor Oscar was no fluke. Whitman made a lot of pictures, some great and many not so great. But with 23 horror entries in his filmography, Whitman deserves to be considered a true Crown Prince of Horror.

Thanks, Harv.  It's estimated that Stuart Whitman appeared in something like 108 films during his career, which guaranteed that he would be included in some pretty awful dreck.  But he was overall a good, workmanlike actor, and his steady presence helped bring a measure of competence to even the most low- budget flick...which is likely why he was brought on board for them.   His best horror film, Shock Treatment, is finally being seen and appreciated again, and that's a good thing.

Article copyright © Harvey Chartrand

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