Elliot Lavine, after 25 years of programming films for the Roxie, is making a momentous switch to the Castro. His job has just gotten harder by six: from a 238-seat moviehouse, he's moving to a 1,500-seater. Will Lavine's fans follow him to the town's premiere art-deco picture palace on a Thursday night? If they know what's good for them. The Noir series I Wake Up Dreaming will show 12 movies never before screened at the Castro Theatre. Incredibly, they'll be shown in 35mm celluloid prints. That's right, a focused beam of light will pass through individual frames, under the watchful eye of a projectionist, creating images of an integrity digital can only dream of. So mark your calendar for five consecutive Thursdays, starting tonight, Aug. 6.
With titles like Dangerous Blondes (1943), Guns, Girls & Gangsters (1959), Inside Detroit (1956), and Chinatown at Midnight (1949), the Thursday night series is perhaps not designed to attract the discerning radical feminist, yet there's at least one treasure not to be missed, playing Aug. 27 at 9:30 p.m. Dementia (1953) is an art-house or hot-house flick dissecting the life and crimes of a sneering female patricide in 57 spellbinding minutes. The title describes the degraded mental state of having lost one's mind, and the film earns its title by following a young woman through the picturesque streets of Venice, California, at night, as she weaves in and out of archways, in and out of nightclubs, in and out of homicidal rage.
Adrienne Barret has this one screen credit to her name on the website IMDb. In her Joan of Arc bob, with her surly deadpan, she cuts an unlikely figure in a medium obsessed with submissive, available, voluptuous, oversexed, objectified femmes. Her face, her expression, her vibe is so sullen, she actually deflects the viewer's gaze. At first, she seems like a monumental casting error. Gradually you realize she's perfectly dreadful. That she happens to resemble infamous smirking hellhound Lynndie England, the dishonorably discharged Army reservist who abused Abu Ghraib prisoners, gives Barret an uncanny socio-political relevance.
Dementia relies entirely on visuals to tell its tale of sordid psychosexual obsession. There's no dialogue, only the words Hotel in neon and Mysterious Stabbing on a newspaper's front page blowing into frame at key moments. George Antheil's soundtrack borrows intelligently from Stravinsky what he can't steal from Debussy. The real star is offscreen soprano Marni Nixon, crisply rendering eerie arpeggios ad infinitum with alacrity. From these humble avant-garde beginnings, she moved on to big-budget films of Broadway musicals, lending her singing voice to Hollywood stars like Audrey Hepburn, Deborah Kerr, and Natalie Wood.
Unlike that cheery escapist fare, Dementia is a surreal dramatization of an abnormal psychology textbook. As seen in a flashback cued by a huge spiraling blur, the protagonist's Oedipal schema might turn any innocent girl-child into a man-hating homicidal maniac. Mom is reduced to an adulterous cliche, all dolled-up eating bonbons on a settee while mocking the advances of hardworking Dad. When he finds a stranger's cigar butt in his ashtray, he takes a gun and shoots her dead. So naturally, their daughter stabs him in the back. Part walking Electra Complex, part Lana Turner's daughter, our anti-heroine oscillates among careers as a jazz singer, whore, and paranoid schizophrenic.
Director John Parker costumes Barret in a drab skirt-suit over a black crewneck rendered medieval by a large medallion on a chain, which might or might not symbolize an engorged clitoris. Barret, possibly the cinema's most impenetrable female lead, exudes a dour dyke affect that imbues her with perversely cumulative charisma as the condensed epic of her misanthropic mania unspools. She churlishly, charmlessly attempts to seduce a john in an upscale hotel suite while the fat capitalist binges on fried chicken. This sequence, with a nod to Wedekind's Lulu, briefly reveals the film's Marx-inflected agit-prop soul. This is a view inside the American psyche Madison Avenue doesn't want you to contemplate!
The Castro will screen Dementia as the director intended, but there's another version, available on DVD, that was slightly tweaked with an eye to box office and distributed as The Daughter of Horror (1955). Personally, I prefer this doctored version that forgoes artsy pretension in favor of cheap, straitjacketed thrills. A voiceover by Ed McMahon frames the action with a few swift, scary suggestions, doubling the paranoid pleasure by implicating the audience in an imminent outbreak of mass psychosis. "Smug, confident, secure, because you are sane," says McMahon in a hysterical baritone, "do you know what madness is, or how it strikes?" Yes, I do. Madness is not seeing Dementia at the Castro Theatre.