Class Acts

Would that Veronica Lake had heeded that lesson in Flesh Feast (1970), it might not stand as the unworthiest swan song ever afforded a Golden Age icon. Helmed by Brad F. Grinter, who later directed 1972’s Blood Freak (the Vietnam-era Reefer Madness update with turkey-headed cannibals the world had been clamoring for), Flesh Feast regards the comparably restrained efforts of Dr. Elaine Frederick (Lake, two years before her untimely death at 50) to refine a process wherein ravenous maggots attack and regenerate decaying skin. It goes without saying that South American revolutionaries are using this method to revive Hitler (successfully), but it might surprise one or two viewers that Dr. Frederick’s true motive is revenge, since her mother died in a concentration camp as a guinea pig for this same treatment. And they say Hollywood is out of ideas.

Lake, who supplied one of the war years’ most appealing heroines in Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels (1941), but whose peekaboo hairstyle and troubled private life (which could inspire a Frances-like biopic) eclipsed her career in the public consciousness, co-financed Flesh Feast with the proceeds from her memoir. It was filmed in Florida (like Frogs) with hapless regional actors, and while Lake at least achieves competency, she appears to have received no direction from Grinter, since her line readings lack the necessary tongue-in-cheek humor (of which she was demonstrably capable). Poor ADR may be partly to blame for this; there’s so much dubbing that the characters seem to be talking past one another.

Still elegant but revealing the toll of the years, Lake is left alone to reconcile the paradox of her first intellectual role being also her most cloddishly written. Her voice is often coarse, and occasionally reaches an agitated rasp; the most that can be said for the first hour of the 72-minute runtime is that she asserts unwavering conviction amid incoherent plotting, static blocking, and arbitrary compositions. What little camp value exists, in a work that by rights should be much more fun, is confined to the last few scenes, in which she settles scores with a Mel Brooks–worthy caricature of the resuscitated Führer (“I had nussing to do vith it! It vas Eichmann und Goebbels!”). “What’s the matter? Don’t you like my little maggots?” she cackles as she hurls the larvae in his face (which, if I understand the scenario, should rejuvenate it). The last words spoken on-screen by Veronica Lake are a sardonic “Heil Hitler!,” and, tragically, it must be concluded that her valedictory film offered her nothing but exploitation and witless degradation. She deserved better, and so do we.

By and large we get it in Ghost Story (1981), directed by John Irvin, fresh from his landmark BBC adaptation of John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979). Having elicited a career performance from Alec Guinness in that miniseries, he sought to quadruple his dividends in this multigenerational suspenser, the last big-screen outing for Fred Astaire, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and Melvyn Douglas (who had just appeared alongside George C. Scott in another horror film with a blue-chip cast, 1980’s The Changeling). John Houseman rounds out the Chowder Society, a quartet of elderly New Englanders who meet frequently to swap tales of the supernatural over cigars and brandy, and to wallow in their lifelong guilt over the woman whom they accidently sent to a watery grave in their youths. Meanwhile, Fairbanks’s sons (both played by Craig Wasson) are beguiled by her vengeance-seeking apparition (the spectral and seductive Alice Krige).

Astaire, Fairbanks, and Douglas look smaller and more fragile than they’d ever appeared before; even the bluff Houseman has moments of startling vulnerability. Whatever the screenplay’s deficiencies, it deserves credit for presenting four eightyish characters who are forced to confront their mortality, and entrusting them to actors well-remembered as lithe and virile, but now unmistakably in their dotage. Douglas in particular plays against type as a man so encumbered by the burden of one misdeed that now, half a century later, he lives on the brink of tears. (Poignantly, the double Oscar-winner died before the film’s release.)

Ghost Story is essentially a thoughtful and serious work, tricked out with jump-scares and moments of luridness (as when Wasson falls fully nude out a window, sharply downward and through another pane of glass into a swimming complex). These superfluous asides made me hate the film when I first saw it as a teenager, but now I view it as two movies in one: just as The Exorcist folded the stories of a priest wrestling with his faith and a single mother juggling parenthood and her career into its paranormal narrative, Ghost Story’s ruminations on weakness (moral and physical), the weight of age-old secrets, the realization at the end of a long life that you don’t know your spouse at all, and the ways in which parental sins are revisited on children are all implanted—well, in a ghost story. One that’s actually less compelling than any of its side concerns.

When Astaire’s character promises that if he survives this last reckoning, he’ll take his wife (Patricia Neal, another legend) to France and tell her the story of his life—and slings the tail of his scarf over his shoulder—the audience is palpably stirred, especially those members who’ve seen him don a scarf and beat a stylish retreat so many times before. Where the other films (save for Flesh Feast) pleasingly skim the surface of their stars’ images and expertise, Ghost Story delves deeper, asking more from its four leads, whose portrayals meld their enduring charm, time-honed technique, and visible infirmity into an effect as elegiac as the New England breeze swirling mournfully outside one’s bedroom window. 🩸