In a 1958 film directed by Bruno VeSota for Roger Corman's American International Pictures, a mysterious spate of killings in a small town in Illinois begins with the sudden appearance of what is initially taken to be an alien spacecraft. There is even mention of sightings of a flaming chariot in the sky, recalling the Biblical tale of Elijah.
It eventually transpires, however, that the small bug-like creatures, which have begun attaching themselves parasitically to the local populace and taking over their brains, are not extraterrestrials but antediluvian throwbacks to the carboniferous period. Their craft has not fallen down from the sky but tunneled up from the earth after 200 million years beneath the surface, here to offer the planet's current residents the "gift" of a "utopia" based on logic and universal harmony - by force, if necessary. Intriguingly, their fifty-foot-tall, spiral transport bears an uncanny resemblance to Vladimir Tatlin's famous monument to the third international.
The creatures - which were apparently handmade by producer Ed Nelson himself using some old wind-up toys, a bit of fur from an old coat, and two pipe cleaners - work systematically, taking over the brains of the local government, the police, and finally the media. It is at this point, when we realise the local radio producer is also One Of Them, that the identity of composer "Tom Jonson" - a man with no other IMDB credits apart from this film - is brought rather sharply into question by a rather glaring needle-drop from the third act vorspiel to Tristan und Isolde.
The plot was considered sufficiently similar to a Robert Heinlein novel called The Puppet Masters to justify an out of court settlement. But Heinlein's novel is set in a far future 2007, several years after a nuclear war and amidst continued tension between opposing East and West powers. In Heinlein's novel the creatures are aliens - from Titan, one of Saturn's moons - but their resemblance to slugs and the way they attach themselves to their human hosts at the base of the necks makes the link pretty close. In Robert Rodriguez's film, The Faculty, one of the characters notes that Invasion of the Body Snatchers was a "blatant rip off" of this novel of Heinlein's.
There is a very peculiar atmosphere all the way through this film. The strange gaps in logic and continuity combine with an excessive use of dry ice, dutch angles, and often superfluous voice-over to leave the film teetering precariously between Ed Wood-esque unintentional self-parody and a genuinely dream-like driftwork. Director VeSota worked mostly as an actor and ended up playing a series of barmen in various TV westerns. But three years before The Brain Eaters he had written and directed (uncredited) one of the strangest films of the fifties: the dialogue-free noir thriller, Dementia, for which George Antheil provided one of his very best film scores.
The latter film was banned by the New York Board of Censors until the year Brain Eaters was released, three years later, when it limped out with meagre distribution, a poor substitute soundtrack, and an entirely pointless voice-over explaining what's going on at every step. It slowly developed a place in cult fandom, however, thanks firstly to being the picture being shown in the cinema in The Blob, and, much later, a glowing review in the RE/Search Incredibly Strange Films issue. It seems the whole thing is now available to watch on YouTube.
With celebrity shoplifters in the news this last week, it behoves us to look back for a moment at the life of Hedy Lamarr. The actress once known in Hollywood as the most beautiful woman in the world was arrested several times for leaving a shop without paying for her items. Interviewed for the documentary about her life, Secrets of a Hollywood Star (2006, Barbara Obermeier, Donatello Dubini & Fosco Dubini), Kenneth Anger memorably recalls an occasion when she was caught stealing laxatives for her constipation. "It was very pathetic," sighs Anger, who befriended the actress in New York in the 1970s.
On another occasion, when arrested again, several decades later, in Florida, Lamarr claimed that a transvestite of her acquaintance had framed her by stuffing the stolen goods in her handbag without her knowing. In 1966 Andy Warhol had made a short film, Hedy, in which Lamarr was herself played by transvestite Mario Montez and shown caught in the act of shoplifting by Exploding Plastic Inevitable dancer (later bit part actor in Knight Rider and Babylon 5), Mary Woronov, and put on trial before a jury consisting of all five of her ex-husbands.
"And here is the best part," sings Montez vamping on Sinatra's 'Young at Heart' in a blonde wig, puffing on a cigarette holder, "You have a head start / If you are among the very - Kleptomaniac". The seventy minute film, which also stars Gerard Malanga and Ingrid Superstar, is notable for its music, provided by a then little known group called The Velvet Underground.
Born Hedwig Keisler in Vienna, 1913, she started acting in her teens and scored one of her first starring roles in Czech director Gustav Machatý's (1933) Ekstase. Viewed today, this wild and dreamlike film seems years ahead of its time, recalling Jean Renoir at his very best, even anticipating some of the surrealism of Alain Resnais, the chiaroscuro of film noir.
Hedy herself is utterly bewitching. Years later, she would tell Kenneth Anger with a raised eyebrow that Hollywood taught her the easiest way to look sexy was to act dumb, but here she is headstrong and willful, possessed of a haunting melancholy, and fiercely independent. She would later claim she was paid nothing for the role and that she certainly wasn't told in advance about the nudity for which the picture soon gained notoriety.
While Hedwig Keisler was growing up in Vienna and making her first steps in the movie business, the American composer George Antheil, was mostly in Paris. He lived for ten years above Sylvia Beach's bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, causing a series of minor riots in concert halls across Europe (one of which would become background action in a Marcel L'Herbier film) with his mechanical music for player pianos. "One day in the future," he once said, "we will make God in the heavens with electric lights."
He returned to America in 1933, the same year as Lamarr, and by 1936 both were living in Hollywood. He was writing film scores for Ben Hecht and Cecil B. DeMille and reporting on soundtracks for Modern Music magazine, with a sideline posing as an expert on female endocrinology, giving advice to the "questing male" in the pages of Esquire. The story goes that Lamarr and Antheil met a cocktail party, she sought him out for advice on enhancing her "upper torso" through the use of hormones and somehow the conversation turned to munitions.
By 1941, Antheil and Lamarr were in possession of a patented method for launching submarine torpedoes without getting their radio guidance systems jammed by the enemy. The technique, which they dubbed 'channel hopping', combined the familiarity with high-tech weaponry Lamarr had gained at her former husband's side, with Antheil's intimate acquaintance with the mechanics of the pianola.
She had the idea of sending out the tracking signal in rhythmic bursts, according to a coded sequence; he figured out you could use the mechanism from the inside of a player piano as the encoding device - the keyboard's eighty-eight keys allowing the torpedo guidance system to leap amongst eighty-eight different frequencies.
Though the military insists Lamarr and Antheil's invention was never put into wartime service and the pair never made a penny from their patent, today Lamarr and Antheil's "channel-hopping" method is all around us. Long after the term of their patent had elapsed, the technique was recognised as an enormously efficient means of data compression. Now known by the term "spread spectrum", it forms part of working infrastructure of GPS, mobile phones, and wireless internet networks - even if few of these devices seem quite big enough to fit the insides of a player piano inside them.
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