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MATINEE
Matinee is a film that I can not write about without bringing in my own memories, both of the time that the film takes place, and my own love of the films from the early 1960s. And I am certain that for Joe Dante, this film contains autobiographical elements as well. The film is both lover letter and satire of both a past era, a staple of genre cinema, and almost twenty years after its initial release, a fond look back at the presentation of movies in a pre-digital age.
Beginning with a montage from atomic blast footage, Dante cuts to the cigar smoking man seen in silhouette, movie producer Lawrence Woolsey. And truly, Matinee is a film that needs both a running directorÕs commentary and possible some superimposed annotation to get all of the jokes and cultural and historical references that are jam packed in little more than an hour and a half. The character of Woolsey is primarily modeled after William Castle, who during this similar period made a name for himself with horror films featuring gimmicks, most famously buzzers under the seats to shock unsuspecting film patrons. But also the name is a play on Lawrence Woolner, who with his brother, Bernard, produced and distributed various low budget horror films from the mid Fifties through the end of the Sixties. Dante also includes a moment when an autograph seeker confuses Woolsey with Alfred Hitchcock, referring to the time following the release of Psycho when it seemed that Hitchcock and Castle might be seen to be imitating each other.
Concurrent to Woolsey coming to Key West, Florida for a special preview of his new movie, Mant! (Half-man, half-ant), are the threats of real life horrors. The film takes place at the same time as the Cuban Missile Crisis, October 14 through 28, 1962, At the time, the possibility of nuclear war was considered quite real. The fears of genuine destruction and radiation are immediately posited against the totally imagined horrors from Hollywood. The premise of Mant! is that the radiation from a dental x-ray that took place while a man was bitten by an ant caused the man to mutate eventually into a giant ant. And while the characters in this movie within the movie take their “science” quite seriously, it is as absurd as the equally laughable idea that one could protect oneself from atomic fallout by crouching along the wall of a school, face down with arm over the head. (I even recall a similar drill where I was covered by my litte desk.)
In Matinee, the illusions of real life are no more logical than what is on the big screen. The only characters who see things a big more clearly are two junior high school students, Gene and Sandra, and Woolsey’s jaded companion, actress Ruth Corday, a nod to Universal contract star, Mara Corday. It’s Sandra who points out to her fellow students who ineffective the civil defense drills are against the effects of radiation, much to the displeasure of her teachers. Gene, a voracious reader of the horror film magazine, “Famous Monsters of Filmland”, catches on to Woolsey’s shenanigans in creating interest in Mant!, grabbing a chance to be part of the fakery. Ruth stays loyal to Woolsey, knowing full well that beyond the big cars and big cigars is a man who can barely pay his bills, or carry enough change to buy a newspaper. In an interview about the making of Matinee, referring to Mant!, Dante states, “You have to remember that the appeal of these movies when we were kids was that we believed them.” But one could say that Matinee is about the kinds of beliefs one has even when one is confronted with the truth about a person or a situation.
At one point, Woolsey compares horror movies to the first cave paintings, and the catharsis of seeing horrific images. What Dante and screenwriter Charlie Hass point out is that it is the unseen and unknown that are more frightening. A clip is shown with popular televison personality of the day, Art Linkletter, daring a woman to put her hand in a box that contains rats. This is a verbal pun as the rats in question are the name given to padded cylinders used for styling hair. The woman gingerly puts her white gloved hand into the dark box, but is clearly afraid of what she imagines is inside. Likewise, some of the characters in Matinee are afraid of the unseen, whether it the Russians or those of African decent in the still racially segregated south. As anyone who has seen a few horror movies should know, the monsters that we see are far less frightening than the ones we imagine.
And yes, even with some of the seriousness that anchors Matinee, this is essentially a fun film to watch, perhaps more so for cinephiles. Joe Dante is encylopedic in his knowledge of films, and impish enough to include a visual gag that recalls Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou, and have a bit of dialogue taken from the tag line of David Cronenberg’s remake of The Fly. The film within the film, Mant! is obviously inspired by the original The Fly, with a title that somewhat recalls The Manster (half man, half monster). The title creature turning into a giant monster connects the film to the many movies that came out of gargantuan creatures that were the unexpected results of nuclear bomb tests. The Dante stock company of Dick Miller, William Schallert and Kevin McCarthy, all of whom have appeared classic genre films from the Fifties is in Mant!. The wizened scientist in Mant! is played by Robert Cornthwaite, a character actor who frequently played doctors, including the original Hawks-Nyby version of The Thing from 1951, and the George Pal version of War of the Worlds from 1953. More obvious are the movie posters from the time, including those of films like Ray Milland’s Panic in the Year Zero, that focused on the then topical fears. Popular music is also used, with the choices being specific to the time, including Max Steiner’s theme to A Summer Place, a song I knew long before I ever saw Delmer Daves’s film.
More open to interpretation is the use of the song, “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”. The era referred to as The Sixties would really get into high gear a little more than a year after the events in Matinee took place. Is the lion of this song, the United States, just prior to a time of great cultural and social change?
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On a more personal level, William Castle scared me even before I saw any of his movies. As a very gullible seven year old, I was frightened by stories of The Tingler, convinced by two neighbor boys that such a creature actually existed, and causing me to have several sleepless nights. Even though I was more or less forbidden to watch horror movies, I managed to read about them once I discovered the fabled magazine “Famous Monsters of Filmland”. Like some others around my age, Forrest Ackerman’s magazine proved to be a gateway to greater cinephilia. This cinephilia in turn led me to study film at New York University where I saw a version of Joe Dante and Jon Davison’s The Movie Orgy at the Fillmore East in 1969. I even became acqainted with Jon Davison, a fellow NYU student at the time, who temporarily ran a semi-secret cinematheque until legal authority stepped in. As for the Cuban Missile Crisis, I was just weeks from becoming ten years old, and while I was dimly aware that something was going on at the time, Cuba seemed a million miles away from Teaneck, New Jersey.
Peter Nellhaus
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MATINEE
Gina Telaroli
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