Blood and Lace (1971): Part One.

Our macabre fairy tale of orphans, rape, frozen corpses, incest, grisly blunt trauma murders, and other assorted carnage and depravity begins with an opening sequence that looks kinda familiar:

We open at night as a Subjective-POV quietly enters an even quieter house nestled on some suburban street located on the wrong side of the tracks. We cut to two people, a man and a woman, soundly sleeping in a bed somewhere inside said house.

Once that’s established, we jump back to the Subjective-POV vantage point, which silently stalks through the house and into the kitchen, where, after rummaging through a drawer, pulls out a claw hammer.

Then, with only the tool in frame, the hammer leads us up the stairs and into that bedroom, where the woman awakens just in time to take several blows to the skull -- clawed end first! Yikes!

And after the still unseen attacker turns this poor woman’s face into wet hamburger (-- and pretty graphically, too, I might add, given the film’s PG / GP-rating), the assailant delivers several blows to the man, too, who quickly slumps off the bed. But this attack quickly refocuses back on the woman, whose savagery remains persistent.

Then, when this frenzied assault finally abates, the killer, whom we never did see, drops the hammer onto the floor, strikes a match, and sets the house on fire. 

With the flames soon raging out of control, the unknown killer flees into the night just as the camera breaks away from their perspective, and then sweeps back to the burning bed, where we see the man, still kicking, trying to crawl away.

Suddenly, a woman screams! A woman that we, at first, assumed was the bloodied victim; but it's really a younger woman, waking up in a hospital room, safe and relatively sound, from yet another bad dream. 

You see, this is Ellie Masters (Patterson), and that woman we saw get murdered was her mother. And since her death several days ago, Ellie has been plagued with the same recurring nightmare of hammers, blood, and fire.

Now, despite her older appearance, Ellie is still a minor. And as the only survivor of the fire, with her single mother now dead, murdered, and somebody’s responsible, and only the vaguest notion of who her father is, the girl has now become a ward of the county. Thus, we still have no idea who that was with Edna Masters when she died or if they survived -- yet.

However, it will soon be revealed that Ellie’s mother was a prostitute and the man with her was most likely, well, just another paying customer, whose identity the film isn’t ready to give up just yet either.

Regardless, the orphaned Ellie will soon be transferred out of the hospital and moved to the Jameson Deere Youth Home, which is run by Jameson's widow, Mrs. Deere (Grahame) and her brutish handyman, Tom Kredge (Lesser). 

Now, Mrs. Deere runs her orphanage like a sadistic Charles Dickens villain; and with Kredge as her enforcer, operates it like a concentration camp, where her charges are given little food and are forced to complete all kinds of grueling tasks on the upkeep of the old ancestral mansion and grounds, while she hordes their monthly welfare checks from the county.

And like all concentration camps, escape is discouraged with prejudice. Case in point, the night before Ellie arrives, one of the other orphans named Ernest (Armstrong) summons the courage to jump the fence, but is quickly run down by Dredge and his trusty meat cleaver. 

And when the runaway thinks he’s found safety behind a stout tree, Kredge wings that cleaver at him, which lops off one of his victim’s hands! (Wait. Is this standard procedure?)

In shock, the victim stumbles off into the woods where Ernest will presumably bleed to death. Meanwhile, when Kredge fails to find the boy or the body, he angrily gathers up the runaway’s discarded suitcase and polices the scene by tossing the dismembered hand inside it(!?). He then heads back to the orphanage, where he's confronted by an irate Mrs. Deere.

For you see, they need that body for ... reasons. Oh, yeah, just you wait until you see what they wanna do with that body. And all the other bodies, too, he typed ominously…

As an actor, Gil Lasky barely had a cup of coffee in Hollywood. Aside from a few episodic TV roles in Men of Annapolis (S01.E11, 1957) and Death Valley Days (S07.E19, 1959), he only mustered a few bit parts as an extra in the features, where he was credited as a soldier in The Young Lions (1958), a frontiersman in The Buccaneer (1958), and that was about it.

When acting didn’t pan out, as Lasky entered the 1960s, he started a moderately successful real estate firm with Paul Monka; and that might’ve been the end of our story right there if not for a chance conversation with Karl Schanzer, a private investigator they had employed, who happened to mention that he, too, was also an out of work actor.

The Sunday News (June 4, 1961).

Schanzer had appeared in a number of films for Roger Corman, including The Wasp Woman (1959) and Dementia 13 (1963). And in that capacity he had also worked with Jack Hill on Tonight For Sure (1962), one of those Francis Ford Coppola Nudie Cuties, and Blood Bath (1966), one of at least three films Corman made by pillaging the corpse of Portrait in Terror (alias Operacija Ticijan, alias Operation: Titian, 1963).

Thus, when Lasky and Monka mentioned that they might be interested in backing a film, Schanzer immediately pointed them toward Hill, who had the barest notions of a script about a family of weirdos living in an old dilapidated house. Regardless, Lasky and Monka were all in.

(L-R) Karl Schanzer and Marissa Mathes (Blood Bath, 1966).

And so, production began on Cannibal Orgy or, The Maddest Story Ever Told in August of 1964. And a strange little fever dream of a movie it was, too, where Lon Chaney Jr. acted as a caretaker for an orphaned family; a family filled with defective genes that caused them to mentally regress into children once they hit a certain age, who in turn must thwart an inheritance grab by some greedy cousins.

Things were going so well at that point the newly minted Lasky-Monka Productions announced they were already in the early stages of their second feature, a take on The Monkey’s Paw penned by Robert Sonerfield (-- as reported in The Los Angeles Evening Citizen News, June 29, 1964).

Alas, this never materialized because, during the production of Cannibal Orgy, Lasky and Monka wound up over-extending themselves, which resulted in their real estate venture going bust. And so, as they declared bankruptcy, and things got messy, Hill’s finished film would wind up sitting on a shelf, tied up in litigation hell for the foreseeable future.

“It was several years before the film got released,” Hill told Paul Rowlands (Money into Light, 2018). “The people financing it had a real estate business that went bust, and the film was locked up in a vault for three years. A friend of mine, a very clever exploitation producer named David Hewitt, had seen the film and kept track of it through all the litigation. When he was finally able to release the film, he did quite well with it.”

The Grand Island Independent (December 29, 1965).

Hewitt was a writer, producer and director, who was responsible for a string of excellent schlock, including touring roadshows like Monsters Crash the Pajama Party (1965) and Dr. Terror's Gallery of Horrors (1967), and features like The Time Travelers (1964), The Mighty Gorga (1969) and The Girls from Thunder Strip (1970).

According to that Rowlands interview, Hewitt would recut Cannibal Orgy before finally releasing it as Spider Baby in 1968, but Hill admitted these cuts were actually an improvement on the original. But after its theatrical run, the film basically disappeared again.

Said Hill (Rowlands, 2018), “It went into obscurity and was locked away somewhere for many, many years until, through a bit of subterfuge, I was able to get into a lab and get a tape of it. It was then released again and it has become a widely appreciated cult film.” 

Lasky and Monka, meanwhile, regrouped and tried again, announcing in April, 1966, that they had signed Gary Lewis, son of Jerry Lewis, to star in their next feature, The Student Tour, opposite Brenda Benet (The Los Angeles Times, April 25 and 27, 1966). 

Gary Lewis on the drums.

Lewis was just coming off the smash number one hit record "This Diamond Ring" with the Playboys. (My favorite was always "Little Miss Go-Go.") The film was set to be scripted by Robert Mark Lewis (no relation), where Lewis would play a teacher taking a plane load of collegians on a world tour. The same blurb said the film would be shot on location in England, Italy and France. But things didn't get much further than that. 

That's the last trace of Lasky and Monka ever working together. But Lasky stayed in the business and tried his hand at screenwriting. He managed to sell one script each to Death Valley Days (S15.E5, 1966), Bonanza (S09.E02, 1967) and The Virginian (S06.E19, 1968), which involved a work release program with three convicts paroled to the Grainger ranch.

Lasky would then team up with Abe Polsky on a story idea where two men pretended to be homosexuals to dodge the draft and stay out of Vietnam; but then they have to keep acting the part when they keep running into their recruiting officer, who never believed them in the first place. Hijinks ensue.

This idea would be picked up by producer Joe Solomon and his Fanfare Films. Solomon was another genre film legend, with releases like The Curious Female (1969), The Losers (1970), and my personal favorite, Werewolves on Wheels (1971), where a gang of outlaw bikers get cursed by some devil worshipers and start sprouting fangs and claws.

And while the official screenwriting credit for The Gay Deceivers (1969) went to Jerome Wish, Lasky was ready to take the next step and get back into producing. As would Polsky, who would go on to either write or produce The Rebel Rousers (1970), Brute Corps (1970), and the delightfully demented The Baby (1973), for which a written description would do no justice. Just watch it. And boggle. And then watch it again. Trust me.

Lasky, meanwhile, would hammer out a script called The Blood Chillers, which saw some squicky shenanigans happening at an orphanage run by a madwoman. He would then strike a deal with Ed Carlin, who owned and operated an advertising and public relations firm for financing, who would appoint Chase Mishkin as an associate producer to be his eyes and ears on the set.

And with a limited budget of $200,000, to keep costs down, they would turn to novice TV director Philip Gilbert to tackle their feature. How’d he do? Well, we’ll get to that in a second. For now, let's move onto the cast.

With the release of Robert Aldrich’s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), which featured Bette Davis and Joan Crawford as fading starlets / feuding sisters living in a decaying mansion, it spawned a whole new subgenre that went by several different monikers ranging from Hagsploitation to Psychobiddies to Grande Dame Guignol, where other aging Hollywood starlets resurrected or extended their careers in a series of schlocky horror films:

Olivia de Havilland would star in Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), and then be tormented by hooligan James Caan in Lady in a Cage (1964). Davis would return in The Nanny (1965), and Tallulah Bankhead would put Stephanie Powers through all kinds of hell in Die! Die! My Darling (alias Fanatic, 1965).

Then there was Lana Turner tripping-out on LSD in The Big Cube (1969), and Veronica Lake as a mad scientist who breeds giant maggots in Flesh Feast (1970). And Savage Intruder (alias Hollywood Horror House, 1970), would double down with Miriam Hopkins and Gale Sondergaard. As would What’s the Matter with Helen? (1971), with Debbie Reynolds and Shelley Winters, with Winters returning again in Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? (1972).

Not to mention Ann Sothern in The Killing Kind (1973), which I contend was actually pretty good, where Sothern plays a mother who ignores and unwittingly enables the serial killing habits of her son (John Savage) until it's too late; and Ruth Roman, who was in The Killing Kind and The Baby, which we’ve already discussed. (Have you seen it yet? You should.)

Even Aldrich was soon at it again with Geraldine Page and Ruth Gordon in What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? (1969). And Crawford would turn this kind of picture into a cottage industry, teaming up with William Castle (and an axe) on Strait-Jacket (1964) and I Saw What You Did (1965), and then Herman Cohen on Berserk (1967) and Trog (1970). And I think Lasky was shooting for some of that old Hollywood magic, too, by casting Gloria Grahame as Mrs. Deere to help punch-up the marquee.

Gloria Grahame.

Gloria Grahame was only 47 when filming began on The Blood Chillers. To me, that’s not very old by any metric; but in Hollywood years, especially for female leads, that is beyond ancient and needling toward the red zone of fossilization.

Coming from a showbiz family, Louis B. Mayer signed a 21-year-old Gloria Hallward to an MGM contract in 1944. And once rechristened as Gloria Grahame, she would make her debut in the screwball comedy Blonde Fever (1944) opposite another fresh face, Marshall Thompson.

As her career steadily progressed, the actress would move from MGM to RKO. Most folks will probably remember her from It's a Wonderful Life (1946), where she played Violet, who challenged Mary (Donna Reed) for George Bailey’s affections (Jimmy Stewart). Or maybe as Ado Annie, the girl who couldn’t say no, in the film adaptation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma (1955), where a tone deaf Grahame’s songs were allegedly spliced together one note at a time.

Others, of course, will remember her for a string of excellent film noir entries, starting with Edward Dymtryk’s Crossfire (1947) with the three Roberts: Robert Young, Robert Mitchum and Robert Ryan. One of them committed a murder out of ethnic spite, the other two tried to prove it. Here, Grahame played a “working girl” named Ginny, who could provide the right alibi for a man framed for murder, which earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress but, alas, she didn’t win.

Still, Crossfire would be Grahame’s big breakout role, which led to similar femme fatale turns in A Woman’s Secret (1948), In a Lonely Place (1950), Macao (1952), Naked Alibi (1954), and The Big Heat (1953), where one of the bad guys (Lee Marvin) throws a pot of scalding coffee into her face, causing permanent damage. (Don’t worry, she gets her revenge later.) And Grahame would eventually win an Academy Award for The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), a sudsy melodrama, even though she was barely in it.

But while the actress was having success on screen, her life off screen was a bit of a train-wreck -- just like the one she and her fellow circus performers barely survived in The Greatest Show on Earth (1952). She suffered through a couple of botched plastic surgeries on her face, including one that left her upper lip partially paralyzed right before the filming of Oklahoma.

"Over the years, she carved herself up, trying to make herself into an image of beauty she felt should exist but didn't,” said one of her frequent co-stars, Robert Mitchum, in an interview with Ray Hagen and Laura Wagner (Killer Tomatoes: Fifteen Tough Film Dames, 2015). “Others saw her as a beautiful person, but she never did, and crazy things spread from that.”

She had divorced her first husband, actor Stanley Clements, in 1948 and married Nicholas Ray, who directed They Drive by Night (1948), Johnny Guitar (1954) and Rebel Without a Cause (1955), before the ink was even dry on the court documents. But their marriage would end in scandal and divorce in 1952, after Ray allegedly caught Grahame in bed with his 13-year old son, Anthony, from his own previous marriage.

The Los Angeles Times (June 2, 1948).

“People are inclined to expect too much of a marriage instead of what they should give to it,” said Grahame in a rare interview with Vern Scott (The Valley Times, May 19, 1959). “A successful marriage is not based on great love, but determination to make it work. It’s foolish, I know, to go from one marriage to another hoping things will work out differently. The faults you find in one spouse aren’t any worse than the ones you’ll find in another.”

Thus, Grahame would regroup and try again in 1954, this time to TV producer Cy Howard, which also ended in divorce three years later. Then the shit really hit the fan when Grahame wound up marrying Anthony Ray in 1960. She was 37, he was only 23. They were married in secret in Mexico, and were able to keep a lid on it for a while, but the scandal sheets had a field day once the lid blew off.

And on top of that, word finally leaked on their earlier affair and both the elder Ray and Howard sued for the sole custody of the children they had with Grahame, leading to a nervous breakdown and a stint in a sanitarium -- complete with some electroshock therapy.

“The scandal arose when she was going through a bitter child-custody battle with her third husband, Cy Howard, who took her to the cleaners,” said Pete Turner, who was Grahame’s partner later in life (The New York Post, January 1, 2018). Turner also said Ray’s claims of finding her in bed with his underage son was pure fallacy. “When she married Nick’s son later, the press made a big meal of it. [But] she never fought back. She never gave interviews ... She just kept her own counsel and suffered as a result.”

Needless to say, Grahame’s career never really recovered. In the 1960s she starred in one lone feature, a western, Ride Beyond Vengeance (1966), with fellow “has been” Joan Blondell. Beyond that, it was guest appearances on TV shows like The Outer Limits (S01.E26, 1964), the one where a group of people get trapped inside an alien disguised as a house, The Fugitive (S01.E28, 1964), and Mannix (S04.E13, 1970).

And so, it didn’t take much coaxing from Lasky to get Grahame to sign onto his grisly little picture. As Hagen and Wagner put it, “By 1971, Grahame returned to regular filmmaking, though mostly in low-budget thrillers. She was now playing psychotics, eccentrics, killers, daffy mothers, over-the-hill actresses, aging mistresses -- basically, anything that was handed to her.” 

"But even in these circumstances it is a great pleasure to see Miss Grahame at work again," observed Foster Hirsch (Cinefantastique, Fall 1971). 

"She was always the most forlorn of movie stars: the perennial outsider, the poor relation, the born loser. She portrayed her sultry, vulnerable, B-movie sirens with such naturalness that it was hard to distinguish the actress from the parts she played. When she disappeared in the late '50s, it seemed reasonable to assume that she had suffered the same kind of defeat which was the inevitable end of a Gloria Grahame character." 

And in The Blood Chillers, "She displays here the same trembling vulnerability, the same thin-lipped nasality, the same bright, frightened eyes in the same tense, immobile face," said Hirsch. "And though the context is different, she seems to inhabit the same whisky-soaked, smoke-laden atmosphere of virtually all of her films. This time, however, the part is somewhat different: she plays a sadistic victimizer instead of a victim."

Of course Grahame was the villain of our film and not the protagonist. No, that role fell to Melody Patterson, who also faced some underage controversy in her career, too.

The Sacramento Bee (October 19, 1965).

Now, my top five favorite classic TV shows of all time are Barney Miller, The Rockford Files, The Dick Van Dyke Show, SCTV, and Emergency (-- I still get way too excited whenever Station 51 has to break out the fire retardant foam). And coming in at number six on that list would be F-Troop. Like with Gilligan’s Island, once you embrace the lunacy, I contend that frontier vaudeville show was friggin’ brilliant.

See, the end of the Civil War was near when quite accidentally, a hero who sneezed abruptly seized a retreat and reversed it to victory. His medal of honor pleased and thrilled his proud little family group. But while pinning it on some blood was spilled and so it was planned he’d command F-Troop, which was garrisoned at Fort Courage:

Where Indian fights were colorful sights, and nobody took a lickin’. Where “paleface and redskins” both turned chicken. And while drilling and fighting always got them down, we knew their morale wouldn’t droop. As long as they all relaxed in town before they resumed with a bang and a boom of the cannon, which knocked the watchtower down again, again. I mean, think about it. Of course that thing always fell down. Look who was responsible for always putting it back up? Anyhoo...

Born in Inglewood, California, Patterson’s mother, Rosemary Wilson, had been a background dancer in the movies and served as a double for Joan Crawford in several films. Her daughter followed suit and her first foray into features came at the age of 12 as a background dancer in the musical Bye Bye Birdie (1963).

But as she foraged around for parts to continue her acting career, Patterson kept running into roadblock after roadblock due to her age. “I was tired of being told I was too young for every part I tried out for,” Patterson told Bob Thomas (The Associated Press, January 21, 1966). “I was fifteen and a half when I had an interview for a role in the television series Hank. They told me to come back when I was 18.”

It seemed to Patterson if a studio had the option to hire a girl who was over 18 to play a 15 year old, they would always go that route. “There were quite a few actresses around then that could pull that off,” Patterson told Tom Lisanti (Drive-In Dream Girls, 2012). “The studios didn’t want to be hassled with a minor going to school or paying for a teacher. I was going on a lot of auditions and working hard at my craft, so I was dying to get a role. There were quite a few roles that I felt I might’ve gotten if I had been eighteen.”

Thus, when she auditioned for the role of Wrangler Jane on F-Troop, Patterson lied about her age. Well, she really didn’t lie. She just neglected to admit the truth. “I did well on that audition and I knew it,” she said (Lisanti, 2012). “So when the producers asked me if I was eighteen, I didn’t argue with them. Then they said, 'Well, you can ride a horse, right?' I didn’t argue about that either. I thought to myself, 'If I can just get tested, then I will have some film.' Then when they offered me the role, I thought, 'Well if I can just do the pilot, I'll still be ahead of the game.’”

But not only did F-Troop go to series, the show became a breakout hit for the network. Now, depending on which source you consult, it was either someone who lost out on the audition that ratted her out, or one of her former teachers recognized her on the Warner lot while there to tutor another juvenile actor. Regardless, the cat was out of the bag that the starlet was a minor -- who was 15 when she auditioned and now 16 as F-Troop went to air.

 The St. Joseph News-Press (January 20, 1966).

Since the show was a hit, the studio decided to let it ride and just toned down the romance between Janey and Captain Wilton Parmenter, turning it into more of a schoolgirl crush. “Ken Berry (Parmenter) was wonderful regarding the whole situation,” said Patterson (Lisanti, 2012). “Forest Tucker and Larry Storch and the rest of the guys were so much fun to work with.”

Now, while the show kinda got buried at mid-season due to Bat-Mania sweeping the country with the premiere of Batman (1966-1968) in January, 1966, F-Troop held its own in the ratings. But then it got caught in the middle of a regime change at the studio and was canceled after only two seasons.

After losing the show, Patterson would spend some time touring Vietnam with several stock companies to entertain the troops. She would then star in the feature The Angry Breed (1968), a rather convoluted tale about a Vietnam vet looking to cash in on the debt of a screenwriter he saved in combat to star in his next movie.

And she would also land a role in the Outlaw Biker flick The Cycle Savages (1969) opposite Bruce Dern, which dealt with a gang of no-goodniks going to war with an artist, who gets curb-stomped and then nursed back to health by Patterson’s character.

Now, during the shooting of The Angry Breed, Patterson fell head over heels in love with her co-star, James MacArthur. These feelings were mutual and the two were eventually married in 1970, with Patterson putting her career on hold to move to Hawaii with her new husband, where he was the second lead in the TV-series Hawaii Five-O (1968-1980), playing Danny “Book ‘em Danno” Williams. But before she left, Patterson managed to squeeze out one more feature for Lasky.

Ironically enough, for her role in The Blood Chillers, Patterson would be one of those older actresses hired to play a juvenile, the recently orphaned Ellie Masters. Granted, she was only 22 at the time. 

But what happens when her character finally gets to the orphanage? And how did we get from The Blood Chillers to The Blood Secret to Blood and Lace? Well, to answer those questions, Boils and Ghouls, you’ll have to tune into Part Two of our Two Part look at this fine fractured fairy tale of foray into feature film. Stay tuned!

Originally posted on August 6, 2004, at 3B Theater.

Blood and Lace (1971) Contemporary Filmakers :: Carlin Company Productions :: American International Pictures / P: Ed Carlin, Gil Lasky / AP: Chase Mishkin / D: Philip Gilbert / W: Gil Lasky / C: Paul Hipp / E: Dennis Film Services / M: John Rens / S: Gloria Grahame, Melody Patterson, Len Lesser, Vic Tayback, Louise Sherrill, Ron Taft, Dennis Christopher, Maggie Corey, Terri Messina, Peter Armstrong