Poor Trog... King Kong had the whole of New York to trash and The Empire State to climb. Godzilla has Tokyo to flatten. Even Gorgo and Konga got smash little bits out of old London town. The creature from The Quatermass Experiment traveled from London Zoo to Westminster church leaving a slimy trail, but what about poor Trog, what has he got?
Well... I will tell you. Two shops in a boring sleepy village in the English country side. Look, here he is in the local fruit and veg shop, I wouldn't say he's tearing the place apart but he is definitely breaking a small number of boxes both wooden and cardboard, he is also bruising an awful lot of the shop's produce as well. Next he takes an intense dislike to the butchers next door, but now he has run out of shops to violate because his village doesn't even have a little corner shop or a post office. What would have happened if he had arrived on a Wednesday afternoon or between the the hours of 12:30 and 1:00 O'Clock, would we find Trog in line with a variety of bored housewives and aged pensioners waiting a bit of furtive retail action, I fear so, poor Trog.
Trog is short for Troglodyte, so named by the film's star Joan Crawford. Trog is a murderous hundred thousand year old Neanderthal man with the mind of a small child, recently defrosted from the ice age, Trog lives in a deep underground cave existing on melt water and cold fish heads which come to think of it, is probably why he took a funny turn in front of all those meat carcases hanging in the local butcher's shop, poor old Trog.
You must understand that Trog's attack on the village is like Kong's visit to NY and Godzilla's arrival in Tokyo, this the film's exciting climax. Up till now Tog has spent the entire time of the film either down a pot hole, in a cage or in the local park playing ball with Joan Crawford and a friend. At this point you must be wondering if I am starting to make things up and I can only promise you I have never been more serious. Joan is trying to domesticate Trog to develop his latent intelligence and prove that he a missing link between apes and monkeys, on one side and you and me on the other.
Rather more you then me I would like to think... Anyway Joan has been having a tremendous success with Trog with little more then a kind world, a happy encouraging smile and a bucket load of ice cold fish heads. Encouraged by Trog's progress she takes him down to the local park as you would with a dribbling homicidal murderous Neanderthal with the intelligence of a small child.
"Fetch the ball Trog, fetch!" Joan emotes very loudly.
It all goes horribly wrong when Michael Gough who must have been miffed that his own campy act has been sidelined and outclassed by Joan, decides to brake into the house and release Trog to the world or least to a small village high street in the home counties. Gough is dispatched by Trog in the only startling scene the film possesses and the only reminder that this is horror legend Freddy Francis directing.
The 1960s Renaissance of British film had for the most part been funded by American studio money. Buy the late sixties the American industry was in more then just financial trouble. The problem was actually more cultural and generational, It no longer understood what it's youthful audience wanted to see and so the outward arms of the industry contracted while it tried to work out it's own problems. Actors and directors working working in the UK were starting to realize they had to take what they could to survive. Freddy Fancis' career centered around British Hammer horror productions. But films like Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist from 1968 and 73, both from youthful directors of the new age, showed the audience what unsightly horrors existed beyond the cosy world of Hammer's Gothic fairy tales. By 1970 taking what you could get looked increasingly like Herman Cohen's production of Trog.
I think that Trog must be the worst film Crawford stared in, it is the last film she performed in and with the exception of a television production in 1972, the last thing she ever appeared in and I have a feeling these two facts are not unconnected. Joan's career stretches back to the silents and rummer has it that she started with a small role in a erotic short called the Casting Couch. By the thirties she was dancing and staring in stage musical films with Clark Gable with her name above both the title and the male lead. But it is in the late 40s and though most of the fifties that her screen image cemented in the woman's picture. Titles like This Woman is Dangerous and The dammed Don't Cry tell much more about themselves then any plot synopsis. Joan played women who were strong powerful, defiant, they were also blinked, unforgiving and manic in intensity. Her characters were cracked in ways that touched deeply the unspoken needs and fears of her audience and that learned her respect and the admiration of women every where.
But by the sixties, like most actors from the Golden era her career was slipping so fast it was starting to feel like free fall. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, Made in 1963, Changed all that,the film was a tremendous success, she was a queen again and Hollywood was her country. It was still perfection even if it was shared equally with the hated Betty Davis. In this two hander Betty was the obvious choice to star against Crawford. There careers and film characters were alike, although Davis was a more intelligent actor and the more diversely talented, her career had slowed down too, they both needed a hit. Never having shared a screen they had long disliked each other from afar. Now they were eyeball to eyeball. There is a 450 page book and a complete television series based on just how much they hated each other and what happened when they worked together that one time. Their contempt for each other was well known in and out of the industry and the film was cast with this in mind. You could have filmed them in a mud fight with equal success because of the way it exploits their status. We look on with horror and delight as they hack away at each other's reputations playing delusional has-beens in this cheep but very well directed, black and white horror film. There are elements of Psycho and Sunset Boulevard swilling though the film, along with the desire shared by all three productions to reap the benefits of appearing to go down market.
But you can only take a slice of your reputation the one time, once torn down it stays d own, specially when it comes to simple spectacle. Audiences arrived to watch their favorite actors speak in the first talkies and then turned away, forever. Universal's monsters appeared with Abbot and Costello to great success but those monsters would not play again. Joan and Betty's career didn't go quite the same way as Count Dracula and Frankenstein's monster,they still worked and they were still stars but their domain had shrunken to a kind of Hollywood hell, condemned to repeat the same formula chasing the same audience for the same success. They were chasing down the circles of Hollywoodland.
Betty Davis made Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte this time with Olivia de Havilland, Davis plays identical twin sisters the one murdering and replacing the other in Dead Ringers and effectively repeating her role and replacing Joan's in the picture. She did two films for Hammer in England, playing a child murdering nanny in Black and white and in The Anniversary she is a one eyed and even more foul minded version of Margo from All About Eve, which defiantly feels like a low point when you are confronted by the film on a late night viewing. But she stuck around cinema eventually becoming a formidable character actor and a living legend with a long unforgiving memory.
Joan Crawford turned down Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte but worked for low rent producer William Castle on two films Strait-Jacket, a film that "vividly depicts ax murders" Castle hopefully warns his audience and I Saw What You Did which has her involved with another murder plot. From one trash merchant to another Joan worked in England but not for Hammer but for Herman Cohen who had all ready produced Kongo and The horrors of the Black Museum in England and I Was a Teenage Werewolf and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein in America, as if didn't know what she was getting herself into. These last two films are Berserk, where Joan plays a circus owner who lusts after a young muscular wire walker played by an actor disastrously named Ty Hardin, when you see his performance you do wish he could remember his own name and then of course our own dearly beloved Trog.
Poor Trog.
3 out of 4 found this helpful.
Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink