Death in Venice, California
On February 1, 1963, Night Tide lapped like an expressionist wave against the screens of American drive-ins and art houses, not to mention the Times Square grind house where Truman Capote saw, and absolutely treasured, Curtis Harrington’s 1961 opus. Night Tide rolls in with the satiny force of its leading lady, Linda Lawson, whose breathy voice expresses alien intensity lurking behind an opaque curtain of melancholia.
It 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. Throughout Night Tide, a strangely hushed invitation lingers in the air: "Come live above a merry-go-round, have breakfast with a hot sailor and an even hotter mermaid, spend hours with an old drunk captain, listening to the strange tales behind the morbid souvenirs of his life.”
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.