Gruff, balding Vic Tayback, most famous as diner owner Mel on the sitcom Alice (1976-1985), sits in a darkened room looking up into the camera and explaining why he and Johnny happened to be in the small town of Camellia Gardens at the same time. “I was there to prove a point, a theory of mine, one I’ve had for a long time about small towns and small living,” he says. Johnny was on the run from the law.
So begins Bill Karn’s Door-to-Door Maniac, an indie heist thriller that was supposed to make a movie star out of Johnny Cash, with country singer Merle Travis in a supporting role. Actually, the film was called Five Minutes to Live in 1961, when it sank without a trace. In 1966, American International Pictures (AIP) bought and retooled it as Door-to-Door Maniac, and that’s the beautifully restored print on exhibit in a new Blu-ray from Film Masters. Adding to the value is a bonus disc of an even obscurer heist film, Aram Katcher’s Right Hand of the Devil (1963), also looking great for a movie that’s not supposed to exist.
What Motivates the Door-to-Door Maniac
The driving force behind Door-to-Door Maniac, or rather, its earlier incarnation as Five Minutes to Live, wasn’t Johnny Cash, whom the project acquired by luck; apparently, he contributed some of his own money to finish it when funding ran out. Nor was it the creation of director Bill Karn. He worked mainly in television, a fact shown in the flat, brightly-lit style. The project was initiated by its female star, Cay Forrester, who also wrote the intelligent script and whose husband, Ludlow Flower, was executive producer.
Forrester plays Nancy Wilson, “homemaker of the year” and a bank executive’s wife. She’s held hostage in her home by a criminal who will kill her if her husband doesn’t cough up $70k from the vault. This home-invasion idea had already been fodder for other films and would be again; one example is Andrew and Virginia Stone’s Cry Terror (1958). Aside from giving herself a juicy histrionic role, Forrester comes up with interesting details to present the idea of suburbia as a kind of trap.
When Fred (Tayback) explains his plan to surly, swaggering Johnny Cabot (Cash), they make a point of sneering at the nice suburban neighborhood where everyone runs by clockwork. The claustrophobic scenes between Johnny and Nancy involve his random destruction of various pointless doodads in the house. However, he’ll lose his cool and be flummoxed by a timer on the stove, which is among the many references to clocks and time. He’s not comfortable with modern appliances. He also sneers that Nancy has seen too many TV shows, although the gimmickry on TV shows will be part of his downfall.
More relevant to the critique of happy suburbia is the family breakfast scene, which occurs before Johnny arrives in disguise as a door-to-door salesman. We’re introduced to a tired, frowzy, blowzy Nancy serving “mush” to her husband Ken (a weaselly Donald Woods) and six-year-old Bobby.
The child is played by self-possessed little Ronnie Howard, already known from The Andy Griffith Show (1960-68), so these scenes have an edgy sitcom-gone-sour vibe as everyone complains about their lot. Nancy feels besieged by women’s groups and the PTA wasting her time, and Bobby has various little demands and complaints. As soon as the petulant Ken leaves the house, we learn he’s carrying on with British-accented Ellen Harcourt (Pamela Mason), a working woman who tries to convince Ken to chuck it all and run away with her to Vegas.
To the audience, this revelation undermines Fred’s delusion that Ken would do anything to save his perfect wife. Various comments by minor women characters, including nosey matron Priscilla (Norma Varden), who forever calls on the phone and ties up the line, signal that Forrester is offering a woman’s perspective on the lives and choices available to women in Camellia Gardens while the men dither in their take-charge manner.
Johnny Cash makes the most of a tightly wound psychotic who can be charming one minute or broodingly playing his guitar and then get mean or blow up in a thwarted rage. He makes Nancy put on a sexy nightgown that she’s never taken seriously in her apparently drab marriage to the gormless Ken.
One of the crucial differences between the 1961 Five Minutes to Live and the 1966 Door-to-Door Maniac film is that the 1966 version inserts a scene in which Nancy tries to vamp Johnny into putting aside his gun, and when that goes badly, the scared and desperate Nancy submits to sex (actually rape) with Johnny and appears to discover that he’s more attentive than Ken – more evidence that her marriage is crap. This scene is presented in the intense, off-frame manner of Joe Sarno’s films.
In the commentary by podcaster Daniel Budnik and film historian Rob Kelly, they assume that Cash didn’t participate in the alleged sex scene because we only see the back of his head. Maybe he didn’t, but it’s part of a whole new sequence in which the dialogue explains that now they’re in a guest room instead of the previous bedroom, so Cash was in the reshoot. Still, the emphasis on Nancy’s reactions throughout the sequence shows that Forrester, as writer, was putting her acting and her character’s perspective at the center of events.
In the Five Minutes to Live version, Nancy’s attempt to vamp Johnny in the kitchen causes him to say lines like “We’re a couple of wild cats” and “You gals are all alike when old Johnny steps on your starter.” Then she calls him a guttersnipe and it goes downhill, but they never relocate to a bedroom or have sexual contact.
Five Minutes to Live has extra dialogues with Johnny’s girlfriend Doris (Midge Ware), who comes to a bad end, and the ending between Nancy and Ken is handled differently. There’s a gag about a news photographer, whom Nancy regards as another invader. We see that Fred is making his confession to the police, although we never understand how he knows about scenes where he wasn’t present, which constitute most of the running time.
For completeness, it would have been nice for the Film Masters Blu-ray to have a segment on differences in the two versions, but inferior copies of Five Minutes to Live are on YouTube and Wikipedia for comparison by the curious. The disc offers options for “theatrical” (16:9 ratio) and “TV” (4:3 ratio) presentations of Door-to-Door Maniac. The 4:3 option is the more correct, in my opinion, and I’m glad it’s there.
Right Hand of the Devil
Right Hand of the Devil is the brainchild or vanity project of Aram Katcher, a Constantinople-born character actor with a minor career in films and television, either as a heavy or sometimes as Napoleon. As his day job, he owned a beauty salon, which helped him finance his dream of producing, directing, and starring in this film, as well as creating the story and wearing several other hats, such as editing and makeup.
The trailer, which Katcher made and narrated with his noticeable accent, gives an idea of his ambitions when he announces “the most satanic plot to hit the screen since Diabolique” in “a film more controversial than Psycho, an actor more controversial than Orson Welles”. He promises “a unique motion picture with a technique developed by Hollywood’s New Wave producer, director, writer, and star Aram Katcher. See da Right Hand of da Devil”.
This is clearly Katcher’s baby, yet he had the great sense to hire an excellent photographer instead of trying to do that himself. Egyptian-born Fouad Said was a brilliant cameraman and entrepreneur who received an Academy Award for developing the Cinemobile, a mobile camera studio in a van. His high-contrast black and white on Right Hand of the Devil, with its mobile shots and vivid compositions, is a continual pleasure. I wouldn’t put it past Katcher if the stuffed cockatoo shown prominently in an early scene is a nod to the similar bird in Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941).
Well, good for Katcher. Right Hand of the Devil is an oddball creation whose plot about a gang of ragtag losers robbing a stadium feels partly lifted from Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956), but the anchor is Katcher’s performance as autocratic, high-handed mastermind Pepe Lusara. He’s introduced arriving by helicopter, from which he steps with natty savoir-faire. He elegantly smokes a cigarette while juxtaposed by a huge, hellish fireplace. After renting a great tumble-down house, he wanders around Los Angeles landmarks and does mysterious things with stolen chemicals in a tub. It’s all very sinister and strange.
Then he sets a minion, Williams (Brad Trumbull), to round up a gang of none-too-dependable losers for the big heist, which the narrative almost entirely skips. Meanwhile, Lusara woos a certain Miss Sutherland (Lisa McDonald), a lonely spinster on the far side of middle age. Since Right Hand of the Devil is McDonald’s only credit, I speculate whether Katcher recruited her from his salon customers. Whatever the case, she does a good job as a figure of pathos willing to throw away her dignity for love, or at least whoopee.
The riotous ending involves stock footage of Rio de Janeiro and a twist so fantastically unlikely and macabre that it transcends reason and crime-doesn’t-pay clichés to become amazing. Katcher gives himself the story credit, while the screenplay is credited to Ralph Brooke, who died the same year; he was involved in a handful of low-budget monster movies.
As the four-man Monstery Party Podcast team points out in their commentary, Katcher’s sole work as auteur not only looks spiffy but serves as a time capsule of early ’60s Los Angeles. Scenes are shot at Dino’s Lodge, a legendary watering hole licensed by Dean Martin, and we see a performance by pianist Jack Elton and upright bassist Steve LaFever. Appearing in the supposed Brazilian scenes are Lydia Goya and the team of Pepita & Adonis, a flamenco dancer and her handsome guitarist, who have plans for the rich gringo.
Burlesque dancer Georgia Holden is glimpsed once but, intriguingly, has a larger role in the trailer; her footage must have been cut. That leads to speculation that this errant print may not be complete. According to the commentary, the print was found by producer Sam Sherman, and when he approached Katcher about it, the latter was livid because he thought he’d destroyed all copies after it was a big flopola. Katcher didn’t want the film to exist anymore because the public clearly didn’t deserve his genius.
We may get the geniuses we deserve, but at least this maverick delusion of grandeur remains with us. Both Door-to-Door Maniac and Right Hand of the Devil testify to the hard work and unrealized dreams of talented people working with nary a budget in the corners and crevices of Hollywood. Such films can serve as inspiration. If they can do it, and we’re viewing their work 60 years later in restored crispitude, why not you?