Night Tide
Canonical stature is both fragile and contingent, and that’s why powerful institutions seek to shore up the various canons with rankings and plaudits. We’ll play along by asserting that one of our favorite “B” movies was originally screened by Henri Langlois at the Cinematheque française with Georges Franju in attendance. Night Tide (1961) was an unlikely contender for this particular honor—shot guerrilla-style on an estimated $50,000 budget, and intended, at least by its distributors, for a wider, less demanding audience seeking mostly air-conditioned escapism.
With its hinky cast, Night Tide invades the drive-in. Marjorie Cameron was a witch in her off-screen life; Barbette, the erstwhile muse to surrealist filmmaker Jean Cocteau, often appeared en travesti; and that lecherous, booze-addled, fresh-faced Hollywood castoff Dennis Hopper makes the scene. A tarot reading at the film’s heart gives Marjorie Eaton her time to shine, traipsing into nickel-and-dime divination from her former life as a painter of Navajo religious ceremonies. Linda Lawson might have been issued from an etching by Odilon Redon, with her raven locks and spiritual eyes, she is our resident sideshow mermaid. Not surprisingly and despite such gentle segues, the film itself traveled a rocky road from festivals to paying venues.
Night Tide had spent three years languishing in the can when distributor Roger Corman smuggled the unlikely masterwork into public consciousness, another of his now legendary mitzvahs to art. And the sleazy-sounding double bills that resulted also unleashed an aberrant wonder: the movie’s compact leading man, a force previously held captive by the studio system appeared like some homunculus refugee from the Fifties USA. Dennis Hopper, in his first starring role, would later recall that it represented his first “aesthetic impact” on film since his earlier appearances in more mainstream productions, such as Rebel Without a Cause and Giant, had denied him meaningful outlets for collaboration.
It’s the presence of its featured players—certainly not their star power—that lends the film its haunting and enduring legacy, and elevating it from “cult classic” to its rightful place in the pantheon of cinema. Despite that, we argue that Night Tide remains outside of these exclusive parameters—upholding an elsewhere-ness that defies commercial, if not strictly canonical, logic. Curtis Harrington’s first feature film escapes taxonomy, typology, or genre, instead fueling itself on acts of solidarity. If Hopper contributes his dreamy aura, then Corman rescued the seemingly doomed project by re-negotiating the terms of a defaulted loan to the film lab company that prevented the film’s initial release. His generous risk-taking birthed a movie monument that would add Harrington’s name to a growing collection of talent midwifed by the visionary schlockmeister responsible for nursing the auteurs of post-war American cinema. And here we enter a production history as gossamery as Night Tide itself.
Unlike his counterparts entrenched within the studio system, Harrington was an artist—i.e. a Hollywood anachronism, with aristocratic grace and a viewfinder trained on the unseen. We see Harrington as Georges Méliès reborn with a queer eye, casting precisely the same showman’s metaphysics that spawned cinema onto nature. By the time moving pictures were invented, artists were moving away from its bloodless representational ethos and excavating more primordial sources for inspiration. The early stirrings of what surrealist impresario André Breton would later proclaim: “Beauty will be CONVULSIVE, or it will not be at all.”
Harrington owned a pair of Judy Garland’s emerald slippers, and according to horror queen/cult icon Barbara Steele, had also amassed an eclectic array of human specimens: “Marlene Dietrich, Gore Vidal, Russian alchemists, holistic healers from Normandy, witches from Wales, mimes from Paris, directors from everywhere, writers from everywhere, and beautiful men from everywhere.” On a hastily constructed Venice Beach boardwalk, Hopper would be in his milieu among the eccentric denizens of California’s artistic underground—most notably, Harrington himself, a feral Victorian mountebank of a director who slept among mummified bats, practiced Satanic rites, and hosted elaborate and squalid dinner parties. One could almost picture the mostly television director in his twilight years as Roman Castevet of Rosemary’s Baby; a spellbinding raconteur with a carny’s enticing flair for embellishment. Enthralled by the dark gnosticism of Edgar Allan Poe that had started when the aspiring 16-year-old auteur mounted a nine-minute long production of The Fall of the House of Usher (1942), Harrington would embark on a checkered film career that combined his occult passions with the quotidian demands of securing steady employment. Night Tide, a humble matinee feature whose esoteric underpinnings would spawn subsequent generations of admirers, united the competing forces of art and commerce that Harrington would struggle with throughout his career. Like Méliès, Harrington pointed his kinetic device towards the more preternatural aspects of early motion pictures to seek out the ‘divine spark’ that Gnostics attribute to transcendence, and the necessary element to achieve that immortal leap into the unknown. What hidden meanings and unspeakable acts Poe had seized upon in his writing were brought infernally to life with a mechanical sleight-of-hand. It was finally time for crepuscular light, beamed through silver salts to illuminate otherworldly and other-thinking subjects.
By the time Harrington had embarked on his feature film debut, a more muscular celluloid mythology based on America’s proven exceptionalism was in full force, taking on a brutalist monotone cast in keeping with the steely-eyed, square-jawed men at the helm of a nascent super-power, consigning its more feminine preoccupations to the dusty vaults where celluloid gets devoured by its own nitrate. Harrington would resurrect the convulsive aspects of his chosen vocation and embed them deep within the monochrome canvas he’d been allotted for his first venture into feature filmmaking, while combining them with the more rational aspects of so-called realism. In the romantic re-telling of a familiar myth, Harrington was remaining true to his gnostic roots and to the distinctly poetic language used to express its cosmological features.
In Night Tide, Harrington maps the metaphysical terrain that held up Usher’s cursed edifice as a blueprint for his own work that similarly explored the intertwined duality of the natural and the supernatural. The visible cracks that reveal a fatal structural weakness and a loss of sanity in both Roderick Usher and his doomed estate are evident in Night Tide’s conflicted heroine compelled to choose between her own foretold death underwater or a worse fate for those who fall in love with her earthly human form.
A young sailor (Dennis Hopper) strolling the boardwalks of Venice Beach while on shore leave offers the viewer an opening glimpse into the film’s metaphysical wormhole—a not so subtle hint of the director’s queer eye—stalking his virginal prey in the viewfinder. A beachfront entertainment venue is, after all, where one would casually encounter soothsayers and murderers, sea witches and perverts, as indeed the guileless Johnny does, seemingly oblivious to the surrealist elements of his surroundings as he makes his way on land.
Harrington’s carnival-themed underworld is both imaginatively and convincingly presented as a quaint slice of post-war America, effortlessly dovetailing with his intended drive-in audience’s expectations of grind house with a dash of glamor, not to mention his own avant-garde leanings, which remain firmly intact despite Night Tide’s outwardly conventional construction and narrative.
Harrington is more than capable of presenting this juxtaposition of American kitsch with the queer arcana of his occult fascinations. Indeed, Night Tide’s lamb-to-the-slaughter protagonist could have wandered off the set of Fireworks, Kenneth Anger’s 1947 homoerotic short film about a 17-year-old’s sadomasochistic fantasies involving gang rape by leathernecks.
Anger would later sum up his early film as “A dissatisfied dreamer awakes, goes out in the night seeking a ‘light’ and is drawn through the needle’s eye. A dream of a dream, he returns to bed less empty than before.” Harrington (a frequent collaborator of Anger’s in his youth) seems to have re-worked Fireworks, or at least its underlying queer aesthetic, into a commercially viable feature film that explores his own life-long occult fascinations.
Both Anger and his former protégé would view the invocation of evil as a necessary step towards the attainment of a higher level of consciousness. Harrington coaxed a more familiar story from the myths and archetypes that informed his otherworldly views for a wider audience, a move that would be later interpreted by sundry cohorts as selling out. Still, Night Tide shares a thematic kinship with Anger’s more obtusely artistic output as acknowledged by the surviving occultist, who confirmed this unholy covenant at Harrington’s funeral by kissing his dead friend on the lips as he lay in his open coffin.
The hokey innocence of Dennis Hopper as Johnny Drake in his tight, white sailor suit casts a homoerotic hue on the impulses that compel him to navigate a treacherous dreamscape to satisfy his carnal longings, just as Anger’s dissatisfied dreamer obeys the implicit commands of an unspeakable other in search of forbidden pleasures.
As he makes his way on land, the solitary, adventure-seeking Johnny will be lured into a photo booth, his features slightly menacing behind its flimsy curtain, and then brightly smiling a second later as the flash illuminates them. Johnny has entered a realm where opposing worlds collide, delineating light from shadow, consciousness from unconsciousness. The young sailor’s maiden voyage into the uncharted waters of his subconscious is made evident in the contrasting interplay captured by the camera, where predator and prey overlap in the darkness. Here, too, we get a prescient preview of the deranged psychopath Hopper would subsequently personify in later roles, most significantly as the oxygen deprived Frank of Blue Velvet—a man who seems to be drowning out of water. But here, Hopper convincingly (and touchingly) portrays a wide-eyed naïf, still unsteady on his sea legs as he negotiates dry land.
As a variation of Anger’s lucid dreamer in Fireworks (and later Jeffrey of Blue Velvet) Johnny will have abandoned himself quite literally (as his departing shadow on a carnival pavilion suggests, before its host blithely follows) to his own suppressed sexual urges; a force that eventually compels him towards denouement.
Moments later, inside the Blue Grotto where a flute-led jazz combo entertains, Johnny spots a beautiful young woman (Linda Lawson) seated directly across from him. Her restrained and almost involuntary physical response to the music mimics his own, offering the first indication of a gender ‘other’ residing in Johnny; an entombed apparition cleaved from the sub-conscious and projected into his line of vision. Roderick and Madeline Usher loom large in Harrington’s screenplay, and Usher’s trans themes lurk invisibly in the subtext. Harrington is arguably heir apparent to Poe’s vacated throne, pursuing similar clue-laden paths and exploring the dual nature of the human and primordial creature poised just beneath the surface to devour its host.
The near literal strains of seductive Pan pipes buoyed by the ‘voodoo’ percussion sets the stage for Harrington’s reworking of the ancient legends of sea-based seductresses and their sailors lured to their watery graves.
Marjorie Cameron (or ‘Cameron’ as she is referred to in the opening credits) makes a startling entrance into The Blue Grotto as an elder of a lost tribe of mermaids seeking the return of an errant ‘mermaid’ to her rightful place in the sea. Cameron, a controversial fixture in L.A.’s bohemian circles, and one-time Scarlet Woman in the mold of Aleister Crowley’s profane muses, would later appear in Anger’s The Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, and as the subject of Harrington’s short documentary The Wormwood Star (1956).
The inclusion of a real witch, along with a host of less apparent occult/avant-garde figures, is further evidence of Night Tide’s true aspirations, as well as its filmmaker’s subversive intent to sneak an art-house film into the drive-in, and to introduce its audiences to the heretical doctrine that had spawned a new generation of occult visionaries that find their sources in the work of Edgar Allan Poe. Decades later, David Lynch would carry that proverbial torch, further illuminating the writhing, creature-infested realm underlying all that innocence.
Johnny approaches the young woman who, seemingly entranced by the music, rebuffs his attempts at conversation but allows him anyway to sit down. Soon they are startled by the presence of a striking middle-aged woman (‘Cameron’) who speaks to Johnny’s companion Mora in a strange tongue. Mora insists that she has never met the woman before, nor that she understands her, but then makes a fearful dash from the club as Johnny follows, and eventually gaining her trust and an invitation for breakfast on the following day.
Mora lives in a garret atop the carousal pavilion at the boardwalk carnival where she works in one of the side show attractions as a “mermaid.” Arriving early for their arranged breakfast, her eager suitor strikes up a conversation with the man who runs the Merry-Go-Round with the help of his granddaughter, Ellen (Luanna Anders). Their trepidation at the prospecting Johnny becoming intimately acquainted with their beautiful tenant is apparent to all except Johnny himself, who is even more oblivious to Ellen’s wholesome and less striking charms. Even her name evokes the soul-crushing flat earth sensibilities of home and hearth. Ellen Sands is earthbound Virgo eclipsed by an ascendant Pisces. (Anders would have to subordinate her own sex appeal to play this mostly thankless “good girl” role. She would be unrecognizable a few years later as a more brazenly erotic presence in Easy Rider, helping to define the counterculture era of the Vietnam war.)
As Johnny ascends the narrow staircase leading to Mora’s sunlit, nautical-themed apartment, he almost collides with a punter making a visibly embarrassed retreat from the upper floor of the carousel pavilion. Is Johnny unknowingly entering into a realm of vice and could Mora herself be a source of corruption? Her virtue is further called into question when she not so subtly asks Johnny if he has ever eaten sea urchin, comparing it to “pomegranate” lest her guest fail to register the innuendo, as obvious as the raw kipper on his breakfast plate. Johnny admits that he has never eaten the slippery delicacy but “would like to try.” Moments later, Mora’s hand in close-up is stroking the quivering neck of a seagull she has enticed with a freshly caught fish, sealing their carnal bond.
Their subsequent courtship will be marred by an ongoing police investigation into the mysterious deaths of Mora’s former boyfriends, and her insistence that she is being pursued by a sea witch seeking the errant mermaid’s return to her own dying tribe. Her mysterious stalker will make another unwelcome entrance after her first appearance in the Blue Grotto—this time at an outdoor shindig where the free-spirited young woman reluctantly obliges the gathered locals urging her to dance. The sight of ‘Cameron’ observing her from a distance causes the frenzied, seemingly spellbound dancer to collapse, setting off a chain of events that will force Johnny to further question her motives and his own sanity.
Mora’s near death encounter through dance pays homage of a sort to another early Harrington collaborator and occult practitioner. Experimental filmmaker Maya Deren had authored several essays on the ecstatic religious elements of dance and bodily possession, and went on later to document her experiences taking part in ‘Voudon’ rituals in Haiti that would be the basis of a book and a posthumously released documentary, both titled Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. Note the Caribbean drummers whose ‘unnatural’ presence, in stark contrast to the more typical Malibu beach party celebrants, hint at the influence of black magic impelling the convulsive, near heart-stopping movements that eventually overtake her ‘exotic’ interpretive dance.
The opening sequence of Divine Horsemen includes a woodblock figure of a mermaid superimposed over a ‘Voudon’ dancer. The significance of this particular motif was likely known to Harrington, a devotee of this early pioneer of experimental American cinema. Deren herself appeared as a mermaid-like figure washed ashore in At Land (1947), who pursues a series of fragmented ‘selves’ across a wild, desolate coastline. Lawson, with her untamed black hair and bare feet, could be Deren’s body double, an elemental entity traversing unfamiliar physical terrain to find a way back to herself.
Mora’s insistence that she is being shadowed by a malevolent force directly connected to her mysterious birth on a Greek Island and her curious upbringing as a sideshow attraction compel Johnny to investigate her paranoid claims, hoping to allay her fears with a logical explanation for both. The sea witch (or now a figment of his imagination) will guide the sleuthing sailor into a desolate, mostly Mexican neighborhood, where her departing figure will abandon him right at the doorstep of the jovial former sea captain who employs Mora in his tent-show as a captive, “living, breathing mermaid.”
The British officer turned carny barker is in a snoring stupor when Johnny first encounters him, snapping unconsciously into action to give a rote spiel on the wonders that await inside his tent. Muir balances Mudock’s feigned buffoonery with a slightly sinister edge. When Johnny arrives at his doorstep to find out more about the ongoing police investigation into her previous boyfriend’s deaths, the captain’s effusive hospitality takes on a decidedly darker tone when he guides his visitor to his liquor/curio cabinet where a severed hand in formaldehyde, “a little Arabian souvenir,” is cunningly placed where Johnny will see it. The spooky appendage serves as a reminder to Mora’s latest suitor of the punishments in store for a thief.
Captain Murdock’s Venice beach hacienda is yet another one of Night Tide’s deviant jolts: a fully fleshed out character in itself that speaks of its well-travelled tenant’s exotic and forbidden appetites. This dark, symbol-inscribed temple at 777 Baabek Lane could be a brick-and-mortar portal into this mythic, mermaid-populated dimension that Johnny’s booze-soaked host thunderously defends as real.
Before falling into another involuntary slumber, Murdock will try to convince Johnny that, while he and Mora merely stage a sideshow illusion—“Things happen in this world”—Mora’s belief that she’s a sea creature is grounded in fact.
Murdock’s business card that Johnny handily has in his pocket while tailing his dramatically kohl-eyed mark is oddly inscribed with an address more likely to be an ancient Phoenician temple of human sacrifice (Baalbek) than a Venice Beach bungalow. A lingering close-up offers another tantalizing, occult-themed puzzle piece—or perhaps a deliberate Kabbalah inspired MacGuffin. The significance of numbers as the underlying components for uniting the nebulous and intangible contents of the mind with more inert, gravity bound matter, existing outside it, as the ancient Hebrews believed, wouldn’t have been lost on Night Tide’s mystically-minded helmer. Mora’s explicitly expressed disdain for Johnny’s view of the world as a rationally ordered, measurable, mathematically explained phenomenon reinforces Harrington’s own world-view, his love of Poe, and the French Symbolist artists that interpreted him.
In Odilon Redon’s Germination (1879), a wan, baleful, free-floating arabesque of heads of indeterminate gender suggests either a linear, ascending involution, or a terrifying descent from an unlit celestial void into a bottomless pit of all-too-human, devolving identity. Redon’s disembodied heads gradually take on more human characteristics, culminating in a black-haloed portrait in profile. The cosmos of Redon’s lithograph is governed by unexplained, inexplicable moral sentience absorbing the power of conventional light. Thus black is responsible for building its essential form, while glimmers of white, hovering above and below, prove ever elusive; registering as if elsewhere, beyond the otherwise tenebrous unity of the picture plane.
Of course, Night Tide has its own unsettling dimensions—this black-and-white boardwalk where astral, egalitarian bums wish to tip-toe along and, somehow, practically all of them do. Not a movie but an ever-becoming place crammed into low-budget cosmogenesis unto eternity. We won’t discuss the ending here, since it hasn’t happened yet.
It was on February 1, 1963, several years after the film had been completed, that Night Tide finally invaded the drive-in circuit.
Today marks the 60th anniversary of its popular release, an occasion that should inspire our collective gratitude to Roger Corman’s sly generosity. Night Tide's bona fides as a work of art, however, ultimately dates to its earlier screening at the Cinematheque française, where crass concerns like profitability and popularity fall away entirely. Henri Langlois and Georges Franju each brought to that screening stores of wide-eyed enthusiasm, sufficient to match their combined historical overview. Neither man could have helped savoring the uniquely soiled atmosphere of a setting ready for its close-up.
By the 1930s, with oil rigs springing up like industrial dandelions, Venice Beach — unveiled a quarter century earlier as "Venice of America," and still called, with a straight face, a Peninsula — was an all-American eyesore. Built upon reclaimed swampland, this one-time dreamscape of would-be aesthete, Abbot Kinney, was now largely abandoned, even by its tourists.
by Daniel Riccuito, Jennifer Matsui and Tom Sutpen