I watched
STRAIT-JACKET (1964) the other night on TCM. This is a film I remember frightening me as a child, though now it’s worth quite a few laughs, and a few eye-rolls, and still a few thrills. Written by the great
ROBERT BLOCH and produced by the nearly-infamous
WILLIAM CASTLE and though as corny, implausible, and silly as any of his movies, this one lacks the dopey gimmicks of theatre-watching (such as spectro-vision or whatever it was called with
THIRTEEN GHOSTS) and is superior in that it never gets boring…
JOAN CRAWFORD stars in this sleaze-fest that leading ladies of her era and caliber were relegated to by the early 1960s (like
BETTE DAVIS,
MARY ASTOR, and
OLIVIA DeHAVILLAND in
HUSH, HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE or the inspiration for all of them,
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE?)
STRAIT-JACKET also stars
DIANE BAKER (as Joan’s daughter) and
LEIF ERICKSON. The great/ridiculous score by
VAN ALEXANDER suits the schizophrenic mood of this flick.
There is a character in this film that is such a s**t-heel, I would like to point it out, but that would defeat the point of watching this film, which I suppose I am recommending because it is a
BAD FILM worth watching!
JOAN throws her knitting needles to the floor with such force, they pierce the carpet. Could
DIANE BAKER’s car be any tinier? We have
JOAN suddenly appearring in her underwear in a bizarrely candy-striped room, losing her mind; we have
JOAN bizarrely (and kind of pointlessly out-of-character) throwing herself at
DIANE BAKER’s fiance, a man nearly young enough to be
JOAN’s grandson (yee-uck)…
JOAN plays Lucy Harbin (a la Lizzie Borden, including the same child’s rhyme altered to suit the film… “Lucy Harbin took an axe gave her husband 40 whacks…took an axe, took an axe,
took an AXE… !!!”)
JOAN falls across the axe, her bracelet jangling,
JOAN falls in the dirt (twice) her bracelet jangling…
DIANE BAKER moves a car inexplicably, has an axe-murderess for a mother, and after a traumatic meeting with her fiance’s parents (with
JOAN's bracelets jangling) we watch a strange (but stupidly necessary) scene where
DIANE’s aunt (
ROCHELLE HUDSON) puts
herself to bed instead of tending to her distraught adopted niece… THAT
HIDEOUS GET-UP THAT
JOAN’s DAUGHTER MAKES
JOAN WEAR…!!!
Cheez and crackers that
damned dress figures way too prominently in this drek, but that’s what
BAD MOVIES are all about. A young, but no more dashing
GEORGE KENNEDY plays the creepy farmhand with the fakest head-chop on record… the film is a bit surprising in that it shows the carcasses of slaughtered pigs, and though most viewers by that time had certainly had a porkchop,
CASTLE understood they probably had not seen real,
recently dead meat.
My favorite lame moment was when the shirt blowing on the clothesline grabs
GEORGE KENNEDY.
At the very end of the film, we see the logo for COLUMBIA, the goddess of that name, without her head… !! BTW, that's
LEE MAJORS who has no lines, but loses
his head in the very first scene of the film.