MooT Clue-in-the-Dialogue: "You gotta be a saint to stand all the power that little box can give you."

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MooT Clue-in-the-Dialogue: "Listen, I'm no cop now. I'm a husband! What did you do with her? Where's my wife? My wife?!"

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MooT Clue-in-the-Dialogue: "If you deny what you know, or what you are, or where you are, you deny the simplest part of being alive, and then you die."

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My second-favorite, unintentionally funny, sci-fi horror western of all time is "The Beast of Hollow Mountain" (1956), starring long-time MooT fave Patricia Medina as Sarita, the sultry love-interest of an ex-pat American cowpoke, Jimmy Ryan (Guy Madison).

The story (written by Willis O'Brien, the man who designed and animated the original "King Kong") concerns Ryan's discovery that the cattle that keep goin' missing from his Mexican ranch are actually hors d'oeuvres for a local T Rex (actually, a cranky Allosaurus).

Turns out the surly dino shacks up inside a hollow mountain (aptly named Hollow Mountain), and local legend has it that the creature emerges only during times of drought to forage for water, a few tons of steak tartar, and unlucky Mexicans. Is this where the term "peasant food" comes from?

Holy Human Chalupas, Batman!

To make matters worse, the village has been set up right next to a treacherous swamp, said to be cursed and full of deadly pools of quicksand, from which no one dumb enough to enter ever returns. Someone obviously missed the real estate seminar on location, location, location!

Sound like the cinematic equivalent of a hot, steaming cow-pie?

You might think so, but I encourage all MooT followers to give "Beast" a chance, It's not that bad, but is cheesy enough to inspire the full MST3K treatment.

Hell, it was filmed in "Nassour Regiscope." So, it's got that going for it. Now, if only I knew who Nassour Regiscope was.

Regiscope was actually a fancy name for replacement animation, essentially animation created by filming multiple, rigid models instead of one super-articulated puppet.

In this case, the models were all hollow clay figurines (fired in a kiln just like the kind you may have used in elementary school, if you went to elementary school before the Eighties), sculpted in various poses and painted to match a larger version, as well as a rubber suit some actor wore if closeups were needed.

I wonder if Art Clokey saw this, and Eureka'd "Claymation!"

Nassour refers to stop-motion guru Edward Nassour, who co-directed "Beast" with live-action director Ismael Rodríguez. It was he who supervised the painstaking process of shooting some 20 different clay miniatures of the Allosaurus to create the illusion of a running and jumping monster (these apparently sold for $20,000 just last month). Many scenes in "Beast" are combos of traditional stop-action and Regiscope footage of the clay minis. The result is a monster that looks like it's doing "The Jerk" — when it's not pulling a muscle, that is. Makes me wish story writer O'Brien had had more to do with animating the beast, since he did a far better job with the creature in "The Black Scorpion" (1957).

Early on, Nassour did try to lure investors by describing Regiscope as a "computer-controlled" process whereby "actuating impulses" were fed to a mechanical figure, thus "bringing it to life for the cameras." (So that's how they coaxed a performances out of Tab Hunter!) This *was* Hollywood, remember, and that was probably the 380th lie told in that town at a particular quarter-second during the Spring of '56.

"The Beast of Hollow Mountain" is actually a quite charming and colorful example of post-Korean War kiddie matinee fodder made for undemanding eight-year olds. It packs a lot of cheesy action into just 78 minutes, along with a lot of treacly exposition to get you to care about the characters.

Yet, oddly, it's superior in a dozen ways to the recent "Land of the Lost," mostly because of its way higher cute factor and blazing retro-cool color palette — if you're lucky enough to find a version that's not washed out, that is. The costumes and locations are the stuff widescreen Technicolor was made for, but most of the versions available on the Internet are dogged by poor focus and exaggerated color shifts caused by sloppy conversions. The original had its problems in both areas as well, since the composite process used was not sophisticated, and merging live and process shots in color — in CinemaScope no less — required extra care, which its budget and schedule wouldn't allow.

"Beast" has a good-natured self-awareness at its core, under the candy coating so to speak, that reminds me of the unpretentiously lovable "Son of Godzilla."

And every so often, scene after scene sans a beast, the camera pulls back and shows ... the mountain!

Hey, maybe this thing was supposed to be called "Mountain of the Hollow Beast"?

Madison — our hero — is as charismatic a piece of man-cake as you'll find in Fifties B's. Along with the voloptuous Medina, he carries this thing as "story" — for what that's worth.

Okay, so he does look a little *too* handsome and campy-debonair in his brightly colored Roy Rogers shirts. Just how did he recruit the troupe of muscular cow-hunks that comprise his fun-lovin', ass-slappin' team of ranch-hands? There's not a Wishbone, soup-in-the-beard-type in the lot. They all look like varnished extras in a Cyd Charisse number in an Old West musical.

Amazingly, Madison's out-ponced on "Beast's" virtual cock-walk by a band of dandy Mexican Vaqueros, whose elegant charro suits, hallucinatorily bright silk neckerchiefs, and exquisitely detailed sombreros evoke regalia designed during an all-night tequila jag with Mr. Blackwell and Liberace. (Maybe they shoulda called it "Brokeback Mountain" based on all the male plumage on display.)

And the camera pans the desolation of the landscape, revealing ... the mountain!

Medina is a walking dream that mixes Jane Russell with Faith Domerogue. I do so like my English-Spanish spitfires in bullet bras. More notable, though, is the fact that her character has more resourcefulness and independence than most period monster-movie eye candy we're used to. She's resilient, sassy, brassy, and tough. When she falls and twists her ankle when running from the beast (a given occurrence), she snarls at the beast. She's no whiner! No stock screaming for her.

Plus she calls Ryan "Señor Cheemy." How cute is that?

And then the shot widens, and we see ... "The Mountain."

The rather formulaic plot furnishes a vintage red herring in the form of evil Enrique Rios (Eduardo Noriega), a rival rancher-racketeer who is engaged to Medina. The jealous and possessive Rios has an ... ahem, a beef ... with Ryan over the fact that his wife-to-be is in deep smit with the fancy-pantsed gringo. Ryan, whose competitive male dander is instantly up, accuses Rios of poaching his cows. The two adversaries hitch up their chaps and snarl at each other, in a bizarre dueling male camel-toe moment that never explodes into proper Western fisticuffs.

Did I mention that there's an annoying brat too? I mean really annoying. I mean he makes Short Round from "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" seem like a well-behaved delight to be around.

Panchito is his name (I told you he was little). He's the son of the village drunk, Pancho, who ventures into the swamp and is never seen again. When you get a dose of the whiny Panchito, you'll chalk up his Dad's disappearance as suicide. Damn! There goes the comic relief.

They search high and low for Pancho (I've already signed Artie Lange for the part in the remake), which brings them to the edge of the swamp. The camera lingers on all that's left of him, his sombrero, floating atop a pool of quicksand, then tilts up to show ... the mountain!

The Jurassic rustler — who doesn't appear on screen until the film's final 20 minutes — has the longest, reddest tongue I've ever seen on film (except for footage of KISS in concert). Did it swallow a live octopus? But that's not the fakest-looking aspect of what is a pretty striking stop-motion creation (you must consider that the great Ray Harryhausen didn't have a hand in the production). That award goes to the obvious painted rubber boot feet used by an actor in an Allosaurus costume for certain shots.

Oddly, those goofy feet are the focus of numerous closeups — it's one of the few times the production values really veer into the cheesy Godzilla-Gumby end of the rubber creature scale. In those herky-jerky moments, I feel like we're watching a Groinpullasaurus with back spasms doing the Macarena.

The SFX team of Jack Rabin and Louis DeWitt ("Kronos" and "Atomic Submarine") aren't close to being in Harryhausen's league, but they give us a serviceable if unsophisticated monstrosity most of the time. If you're in the 3rd grade, that is.

I do love this beast of the empty hillock regardless of all of my sarcastic comments. And I think it's a boy, actually. A young monster, just like the beast in "Cloverfield." He's just so mischievous. He's feisty. He causes a cattle stampede (actually, speeding up the camera does) — to, what, tenderize his meal? And each cow he catches is devoured with uncommon joy. He (thankfully) terrorizes little Panchito for shits and giggles. Smelling a trap, he clumsily moonwalks backwards out of a some swamp goo. He just doesn't like the feeling of mud between his toes.

When Sarita and Panchito hole up in a house, he runs around it woo-wooing like a dopey dervish before sticking his snout through the roof — just to drive them batty, I think. He slides down a dirt embankment on his prodigious butt and chases after a horse. He fights like a mental patient. Through it all he wiggles that tongue crazily and brays like a cross between a cougar and a hyena.

Turns out it's the shortest reign of terror of any movie beast ever, clocking in at around 14 minutes.

"TBoHM" certainly inspired Harryhausen's "The Valley of Gwangi" (1969), which turns out to be my favorite — and perhaps the best — Western monster movie ever made (and the full realization of O'Brien's tale). D'ya think Gila Golan, "Gwangi's" version of Sarita as I call her, has something to do with that?

Best line? When Ryan opines "You know, I've always believed that sombreros were the goofiest-looking hats ever invented."

Watch "Beast" here, in its entirety, as it resides in the public domain.

In the meantime, a few more pix of funky cool Medina might help explain my gushing ...

That hunk of man up there with Patty is Lex Barker; the still is from "Duel on the Mississippi" (1955), in which she played a man-eater named Lili Scarlet.

And where was this hot tamale born? Why, where else but Liverpool, England!

P.S. Patty turned 90 this past July.

MooT Clue-in-the-Dialogue: "We operate on a first-name basis. My first name is Captain."

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Mother ...

And daughter ...

Although Eva looks like she got more of "it."

MooT Clue-in-the-Dialogue: "They feel no fear. Cortical nerve clusters show complete inactivity. They feel no pain. Concepts of morality are disengaged. They feel no regrets. No remorse."

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Bob was one of my favorite character actors. I loved his gravelly voice and that catcher's mitt of a face that had dockyard and dogface toughness written all over it.

The Animal's real name was Stanislas Kasava (which I still use as an Internet alias from time to time), and fans of the movie will remember he had a major crush on pinup Betty Grable. When Harvey Lembeck dresses up as a girl for the POW's Christmas party, Strauss hallucinates that Lembeck is Betty and creeps Lembeck out when he takes his delusion a little too far.

In addition to "The Animal," he's best remembered by the MooT as Beer Barrel in "The Bridges at Toko-Ri" (1954), PFC Bernstein in "Attack" (1956), Black Frankie Udino in "I, Mobster" (1958), and Romeo Scragg in "Li'l Abner (1959). He was also the janitor in Marilyn Monroe's and Tom Ewell's apartment building in "The Seven Year Itch" (1955).

A quintessential "New York actor," Bob moved from Broadway into TV in the early Fifties, appearing in many shows emanating from Manhattan — things like "Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse, "The Alcoa Hour," "Damon Runyon Theater," "The Eddie Cantor Comedy Theater," "The Ford Television Theatre," "The Colgate Comedy Hour," "The Pepsi-Cola Playhouse," "Cavalcade of America," and the "Schlitz Playhouse of Stars."

He appeared as a guest star in numerous TV shows in the Sixties.

Bob died in 1975.

MooT Clue-in-the-Dialogue: "Sir, this is Private Elliot at Opana Point. There's a large formation of planes coming in from the north. 140 miles, 3 degrees east."

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All photos are used solely for the purpose of discussion and comment. These images are not intended for any commercial purpose. Credit, where known, is given. No copyright is implied or granted. Many are from my personal collection of movie production stills and lobby cards.

Another one of Stel's numerous "Fallen Woman" roles, which she would bring to an apotheosis in "The Ballad of Cable Hogue" (1970).

I think the woman in the other barrel is Ariadna Welter, a Mexican actress of some repute. But if anyone knows for sure, comment to confirm or correct.

MooT Clue-in-the-Dialogue: "Life is simple now. They just have to do what I say."

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MooT Clue-in-the-Dialogue: "I don't like the way Teddy Roosevelt is looking at me."

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No! Not Patrick O'Neal!

I mean Bibi Andersson!

Ignore that human 2 by 4 O'Neal. I cheered when Gary Busey shot him in "Under Seige."

I was too lazy to Photoshop him out and me in of some of these production stills. What a wanker! (Say it like David St. Hubbins.)

As photographed by Bill Ray for LIFE Magazine, 1964.

MooT Clue-in-the-Dialogue: "Well, you have one week to recover the letter. Seven days, Polakov."

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What a great shot of Babs as she appeared as safecracker B.A. in John Huston's noirish, seedy spy-story "The Kremlin Letter" (1970).

Which, I must report, is one of the best, twisty-original spy films you've never seen — and not merely because we get to see George Sanders gussied up as an old drag queen, and our old friend Paladin, Richard Boone, gone blonde.

"The Kremlin Letter" is cleverly scripted, intense and gritty, and exposes the cruelty, ruthlessness, and amorality inherent in the well-storied world of Cold War espionage. It's also as bizarrely a detailed Cold War caper movie as you'll find, which probably goes a long way to making it more likable than it might seem from some reviews, which are caustic to say the least.

The film does have its problems, including what seems to be a risky dialogue or dubbing experiment. Characters begin speaking their lines in Russian (sans English subtitles), and then switch to English mid-sentence. In "The Hunt for Red October," the actors began with a sentence in the foreign tongue, and then switched to English for good. But, if you're paying attention and have a brain bigger than a walnut, you'll get it.

Other reviewers find the story messy, dense, opaque, and convoluted — and chalk it all up to the amok auteurism that made for several critical misses in Huston's erratic period (anything he did after 1966, starting with wrecks like "The Bible: In the Beginning" and scraping bottom with 1969's "Sinful Davey"). Not me. I think the thing is brilliantly layered and supremely entertaining, not just a series of solid parts (as some have said) dogged by interstitial weaknesses that sum to something less. It is based on a book, for Chrissakes! Remember those? And this one was, as they say, labyrinthine. Noel Behn, who wrote the novel, wrote another solid, quirky spy novel rife with motley characters, "The Shadowboxer." They were the types of tales that you'd stay up late to finish.

I liken the underpinnings of a good espionage yarn to the convoluted office politics in even the smallest companies. Who does one trust absolutely? Who's really in the know about what's really going on? Who knows what's gonna happen before it does? Who pulls whose strings, and who's misdirecting who? What's the other hand doing when one hand is on your shoulder? Do we really know anything or anyone for sure? The "Wilderness of Mirrors" indeed. And it was subject matter that Huston was familiar with, from a World War II stint in the U.S. Army's Counterintelligence Corps (C-I-C).

The human-on-human chess-games going on inside the grander matches between nation-states are undeniably depressing and cynical, but that's what I look for in these more cerebro-glacial spy tales (as opposed to pure entertainments). Depictions of a cold, cruel, and senseless world running on relentless automatic — and how that plays out in the lives of the people caught up in it. Now, that's right up my espionage-lovin' alley.

Long, beautifully lensed story short, terminally ill spymaster Dean Jagger and grizzled operative Boone are two higher-level agents working for a "good" (read: Western) intelligence agency. They form a team of aging mercenaries and other pros to go into Russia to retrieve an "explosive" document whose very existence threatens the profitable status quo that the Cold War has provided for the Americans and Russians. The letter apparently implicates the United States in a plot to assist the Soviet Union in keeping nuclear brat Red China from becoming a world power. The old "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" factor at work. So we have cases of strange bedfellows all over the place. The U.S. in bed with Russia to screw over the Chinese, and the unlikely assemblage of male and female spooks who both screw, and screw over, each another with abandon.

Boone is the real star here. He's a downright evil creep (referred to only as Ward) capable of anything. How vexing that he's ostensibly on the side of "right."

The team — less than crack on the surface — consists of Patrick O'Neal, Nigel Green, Parkins, and Sanders. Linguistic genius O'Neal has a photographic memory and a death-wish, and both figure into the plot's gadget-free proceedings.

Parkins' character is a virgin as well as a safecracker. I suppose that's supposed to be ironic, a Huston trademark. B.A.'s father, another old spy code-named The Erector Set, has been training her for years to replace him. She's such an accomplished thief that she can pick any combination lock with her toes while lying on her back in a purple cat-burglin' leotard. We're left wondering what else she can do on her back, in or out of the leotard, and even why she's called B.A. Beautiful Ass comes to mind.

Speaking of toes, Huston must have a thing for 'em, because we also get a scene in which one Russian agent tongue-bathes the little piggies of another. Thankfully, the little piggies belong to Swedish actress Bibi Andersson. The tongue belongs to Max von Sydow.

And speaking of irony, casting a flat-liner like the always wooden O'Neal as the "hero" (Charles Rone) is one thing, but having everyone treat him as a Bondian cocksman, is another. I'm writing it off as another Huston in-joke. But make no mistake. This is not even remotely like a slick 007 opus. "The Kremlin Letter" is all about skullduggery, scumbaggery, and physical and psychological buggery. (James Coburn was Huston's first choice to play Rone. Odd ... I've always thought that O'Neal was a serviceable Coburn if you needed a version of Coburn with the charm sucked out of him.)

The singular device I love in this thing is the notion of "The Intriguingly Named Operative." Though perhaps not so imaginatively named as the characters in the Bond films, the names here are not as campy and punny as Pussy Galore and Plenty O'Toole. They're more bent, a little mysterious, and slightly reminiscent of the oblique or downright goofy style of naming that novelist Trevanian exercises in his novels ("The Eiger Sanction," "Shibumi"). In "TKL" we have such nifty, intriguing monikers as Highwayman (Jagger), The Whore (Green), The Erector Set (Niall MacGinnis), Sweet Alice (Micheál MacLiammóir), Puppet Maker (Raf Vallone), The Negress (a lesbian seductress-blackmailer, played by Vonetta McGee), and Warlock (Sanders). There's also The Ditto Machine, The Priest, and The Dentist.

I guarantee, however, that you will be startled by the image of an extremely ancient-looking George Sanders in a blonde wig and heavy false eyelashes playing "Love is a Many Splendored Thing" on the piano in a gay bar — at a time when mainstream moviegoers could imagine what a gay bar might be.

Rounding out the inspired casting is Orson Welles, who plays a Russian spymaster, and aforementioned Bergman fixtures von Sydow and Andersson, who captivate as a lovey-dovey couple that capitalizes the K in Kink in KGB. Andersson also puts the defect in defector — she plays her character Erika as such a beautifully damaged creature that I can just watch her scenes over and over again.

And, of course, we have a nice zig-zagging plot (faithful, almost scene by scene, to Behn's complex narrative), peopled by compulsive liars and bullshitters, and full of double-crosses and unexpected reveals and side-switching.

"TKL" also boasts a fantastic tagline ...

If you miss the first five minutes, you miss one suicide, two executions, one seduction, and the key to the plot.

File under "M" for Misunderstood Flop, but also under "S" for Subzero Spy Thrillers, in the same icy-amoral vein as "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold" (1965), "The Quiller Memorandum" (1966), "The Double Man" (1967), "Night Flight From Moscow" (1973), Huston's own "The Mackintosh Man" (1973), and the pinnacle, "Winter Kills" (1979).

It was ahead of its time in more than just a few ways, including its harsh depiction of homosexuality, prostitution, and organized crime in Russia, which, in 1970, ran completely counter to the propagandized image of that country as a bastion of morality standing against the corrosive tide of Westernization.

Since filming in Moscow was impossible at the time, Finnish capital Helsinki was tarted up, and comes across as a filthier Leningrad, which makes for a quite convincing stand-in for Moscow.

"The Kremlin Letter" is an obvious-to-me influence on the darkly unpatriotic spy yarns to come. The lack of patriotism I'm referring to comes from their portrayals of U.S. agents as completely corruptible, callous, duplicitous, and sadistic. This turn towards nastiness came for me in "The Black Windmill" (1974) and "3 Days of the Condor" (1975).

More? Here ...

PostScript: Perky Parky also appeared in another MooT Fave the following year, "Puppet on a Chain" (1971), based on Alistair MacLean's thriller about the Dutch drug trade. That's the movie that etched the name Sven Bertil-Taube in my memory forever.