INANIMATE CARBON GOD

So I’ve been meaning to do this for, well, ages. Way back in the dim dark past of December ’24, I put up a poster for The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T. with the comment that I’d review it eventually as part of the Century of Cinema thing I was doing. Then that project fell by the wayside without me doing said review, and I’ve dithered over it ever since. But now here it is… courtesy of Franz Planer.

Now, I was unfamiliar with this gentleman until a week or so ago, when one of the various film-related accounts I see on Bluesky acknowledged it was his birthday:

Hang on… Alraune AND 5000 Fingers? One of the most important films in my personal history AND one of the most baffling things ever to come from Golden Age Hollywood? He did both of those? A quick bit of research ensued, obviously, and I discovered that Franz (or Frank) had quite a career in pre-Nazi Europe and then Hollywood. And then, just a day or two ago, I read an article about a new biography of Audrey Hepburn, which noted how many of her friends in Hollywood were European emigres like her, and specifically mentioned Planer as one of them. I took that as a sign that I needed to watch 5000 Fingers again at last. I shall review Alraune (which I’ve also been meaning to rewatch) soon, too.

Anyway, like I said, this is one of the strangest films that Hollywood ever produced, and it was also one of its most notorious bombs, a little too out there for 1953 audiences (reportedly, preview audiences started walking out just 15 minutes into the show). Accounts of the production indicate it was even weirder, and alas that the earlier version seems to have been destroyed… it went massively over-budget, straining the already frosty relationship between producer Stanley Kramer (who I still can’t believe had this thing to his credit) and Columbia owner Harry Cohn, nearly half the musical numbers were cut, and its author, one Theodore Geisel (yes, Dr. Seuss himself), was left so aghast by the entire thing he rarely spoke of it again.

But now here we are, over 70 years since it first crawled into cinemas. We’re a bit more used to this sort of thing now. And yet it hasn’t got any less strange in that time; when I last watched it back in the oughts I was impressed by its bizarreness, and I was just as impressed tonight if not more so. And I don’t think it’s the sort of strangeness that can be dismissed as “surrealism”. I think it’s because it’s live action, not animated, that makes it seem so bizarre; I think it might’ve been more “acceptable” in cartoon form. But these are actual people in those spaces, and even if the sets were enhanced by matte paintings or models or whatever, those spaces look enormous. And empty for the most part. I thought about Giorgio de Chirico more than once.

And I was also struck by just how large Hans Conried’s performance is as the title villain. Apparently his performance style always inclined that way, but he really goes big, far more than any of the other actors. Mind you, when you’re wearing these costumes…

…how do you play “small” in gear like that? This was delightful to revisit, and I only wish now that they’d held off making it for another year or two so they could’ve done it in Cinemascope. Imagine seeing the whole of that piano monster in widescreen…

You may be shocked (or not) to learn that porn doesn’t actually interest me that much. I’m kind of interested in the history of it, but less so the actual products of the industry (a nice display of nudity is fine, but actually watching peope fuck doesn’t grab me. It’s a longish story). That history, of course, includes the artwork promoting the stuff, and I think I’ve posted a few examples in the Important Images series… but I just found this one tonight, via a Tumblr called Vintage Adult Movie Posters, and I decided to post it here cos I’m a bit puzzled by the author’s comment about it: “Not sure what the ‘ultimate sin’ is all about…” I mean, like I said, I may not be interested in actually watching the stuff, but even *I* know why this title is a kind of infamous one. This is the film’s IMDB entry, and the plot summary therefrom:

A female friend of a sexually frustrated mother tries broadening her horizons with a sex orgy. Though avoiding it, the new feelings inside her cause her to force herself on her sleeping son. To her amazement, the seduction is mutual.

So… yeah. That’s what the “ultimate sin” is about. The film’s Wiki entry features a rather more up-front poster that makes it even clearer. Notably, the film was written by a woman, that being director Kirdy Stevens’ wife Terrie, and I don’t know what that may or may not say about their relationship at the time. Per IMDB, Stevens didn’t allow swearing in his films; apparently showing fuck was fine but saying fuck wasn’t…