Storm Damages Outdoor Theater

The severe windstorm that destroyed six homes in Stamford and brought down hundreds of trees on Saturday, March 13, caused us to lose 6 trees on our own property.

Unfortunately, 2 of those trees were the ones responsible for hoisting our outdoor movie screen up into the air every year!

After many years of presenting outdoor films each summer, we regret that the outdoor theater is closed until further notice.

I know that many of our “regulars” will miss this fun activity, and I hope that someday soon we may resume the outdoor screenings.

Make sure you have added your name to the mailing list (top right corner of this page) — we’ll send an email announcement to let you know when the situation changes.

Thanks to all who have expressed their concern over the damage to our house and property.

Thanks for a Great Summer; See You in 2010!

The wires and cables are all put away for the winter, and the giant movie screen will be lowered and disassembled this afternoon.  The film projectors and sound equipment are safely stored, too.

Thanks to everyone for a terrific summer of outdoor movies!  The weather was generally favorable (we had only 2 rain cancellations), and the audience at our Labor Day Weekend “Laurel & Hardy Comedy Night” was the largest we have ever had!  Those we attended this summer enjoyed classics that included “Casablanca,” “Citizen Kane,” “12 Angry Men,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” and more!

Our 2010 season will begin in June, and I’ll write more as the time approaches. Until then, please tell your friends about our outdoor movie shows, and encourage them to sign-up for the mailing list on this website — it’s the only way to know about our film schedule and upcoming plans!

See you next year!

“Laurel & Hardy Comedy Night” – Labor Day Weekend, Sat., Sep. 5 at 8PM

Our much-anticipated, annual “Laurel & Hardy Comedy Night” rounds-out our 2009 summer film series this weekend!

Join us as the Stamford Chapter of the official, worldwide, Laurel & Hardy Appreciation Society presents 4 hilarious Laurel & Hardy comedies on our huge, outdoor screen!  You don’t have to be a member; all are welcome to attend this special event!

This is our last outdoor movie for the season, so be sure not to miss it!

Date: Saturday, Sept. 5 (Rain Date: Sunday, Sept. 6)

Time: 7:30PM Meeting; 8:00PM Movies

Rain Cancels Aug. 29 Outdoor Movie

Due to the continued rain we’re experiencing from passing Hurricane Dan, tonight’s outdoor movie is canceled.

“Witness for the Prosecution” – Sat., Aug. 29 at 8:30PM

“WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION” (1957) is a classic courtroom drama you won’t want to miss!

Here’s what film historian Lou Sabini says about the film:

Novelist Dame Agatha Christie (1886-1976) has enjoyed a successful, although sparse, exposure by filmmakers. Some of her more memorable transformations from script to screen were “And Then There Were None” (1945), “Murder She Said” (1962), and “Murder on the Orient Express” (1974). But for sheer unadulterated entertainment, her classic courtroom drama WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION stands in a class by itself.

A corking good murder mystery with the inevitable ‘Christie’ twist at its conclusion, this film benefits from an outstanding cast who do their best to unmercilessly out-mug one another, with extremely satisfying results. Charles Laughton as the convalescing barrister who is more or less coerced into defending a seemingly likeable young man accused of murdering a rich widow and his real-life wife Elsa Lanchester as his faithful nurse are superb. It makes one wonder how often they practiced their craft because these two veterans perform perfectly like a finely tuned swiss watch. Marlene Dietrich as the faithful (?) wife of the accused man is equally hammy in her performance, but seen to good advantage as she successfully takes a stab at her own scene-stealing. Still looking quite sexy at age fifty-six and already a grandmother, it is a credit to Dietrich that she could play this role so convincingly.

As for Tyrone Power (1913-1958), this alas was his last completed film work and also one of his best. Looking somewhat overweight and puffy due to years of hard living, he is still the personification of the matinee idol. Amongst an array of fine perfomances in WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION, Power turns in the best, which is no small feat, to say the least! Never more than a major personality, Power was never considered a great actor by any means. However there were good, even great performances evident in “Mark of Zorro” (1940), “The Razor’s Edge” (1943), and “Nightmare Alley” (1946). In his earlier efforts, after his first starring role in “Lloyds of London” (1936), his frequent director, Henry King, didn’t have too much faith in the young actor, saying that he would have him recite his lines quickly and get him in and out of a scene as fast as possible. Not to take anything away from Henry King, he just wasn’t in the same league as a Rouben Mamoulian or a Billy Wilder, who were able to get first-rate performances out of Power.

As a film WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION was an odd choice for director Billy Wilder.  Never before had he attempted courtroom drama, preferring mainly light comedies.  Sometimes he would delve into other genres, such as film noir. Perhaps Wilder thought he could cash in on WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION’S success on the English stage or maybe he wanted to merely try  something different for a change. His previous hits including “Double Indemnity” (1944), “The Lost Weekend” (1945), “Sunset Boulevard” (1950), “Stalag 17″ (1953), and his later “Some Like It Hot” (1959) have all become movie classics. While others like “The Major and the Minor” (1942), “A Foreign Affair” (1948), and “The Seven Year Itch” (1955) are considered minor classics at best.

Incidentally, watch for a few “inside” gags in WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION. For instance, Marlene Dietrich warbles a song while showing off her famous legs which is remininscent of her “Falling in Love Again” routine in “Blue Angel” (1930). Another interesting sidelight in the film has Tyrone Power and the rich widow, played by Norma Varden, together watching a movie at the local Bijou–the movie being”Jesse James”. It just so happens that Power starred in the 1939 version! Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester also have a wonderful scene where Elsa suggests to her patient “We’d better go upstairs now and get undressed and lie down”, to which Laughton snarls, “We? What a nauseating thought”.

– Lou Sabini

We’ll present “WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION” on a huge, outdoor screen this Saturday night at 8:30PM, paired with a classic cartoon, short subject, and Drive-In intermission films!  Don’t miss it!

No Movie on Sat., Aug. 22

Due to a schedule conflict, there will be no movie on Sat., Aug. 22.  Join us on Sat., Aug. 29 for Agatha Christie’s “Witness for the Prosecution” starring Tyrone Power and Marlene Dietrich!

Lou Sabini, Film Historian, to Introduce “12 Angry Men” Tonight

I am thrilled that my dear friend and noted film historian, Lou Sabini, is going to join us this evening and introduce tonight’s feature, “12 ANGRY MEN”.  Lou has appeared on television, has written for Bottom Line Personal, and teaches film classes which regularly fill to capacity at Sacred Heart University.  He was the subject of a recent article in The Stamford Advocate, which I am pleased to share with you here:

Film buff is happy to share his love of old movies
By Beth Cooney
Staff Writer Stamford Advocate

Even though he grew up in the television age, vintage movies captured Lou Sabini’s imagination. He especially loved the slapstick comedy of Laurel and Hardy.

As a boy, Sabini earned 25 cents an hour working in the former family furniture store, P. Sabini & Sons of Stamford. He used the money to buy reel-to-reel movies and amassed a collection that today exceeds 1,000 films. His first film, of course, was a Laurel and Hardy, “Way Out West,” a 1937 film. Sabini says, “It is still one of the best comedies ever made.

“I think I was bored,” explains Sabini, who says his family moved from Shippan to North Stamford after the devastating flood of 1955. “North Stamford was very different, much more rural then and I was lonely. Movies filled the void. Laurel and Hardy made me laugh.”

Now Sabini fills a void for seniors throughout Fairfield County by sharing his collection in film classes he teaches at colleges, community centers, continuing education courses and assisted living facilities. In Stamford he will begin teaching classes this month at the Jewish Community Center and through the Learning in Retirement program at Sacred Heart University’s Springdale campus. Often, his classes sell out. He says his students “teach me as much about the movies as I teach them.”

“I tried to teach college-level courses to traditional students, but it didn’t work out,” says Sabini, who has a day job in sales. “The colleges were enthusiastic about what I had to offer, but the kids didn’t sign up for the classes. Their idea of a vintage movie is something different. … It kind of bothered me, but I found an audience with seniors. They appreciate these movies in much the same way I do.”

Sabini, 56, is the Grand Sheik (or president) of the local Laurel and Hardy Society, Sons of the Desert. When he was 12, Sabini wrote to Stan Laurel, who was living in California, and asked if he could call. “He said, of course. He knew I was collecting his films and I think he felt he had an obligation to reach out to people who did that.” They spoke and corresponded during the two months before Laurel died.

Even though he can speak with almost encyclopedic knowledge about each of the 106 Laurel and Hardy films, his tastes are not limited to the work of the two funnymen. “I like all old movies. They were better written, of course. I don’t like contemporary ones too much. I don’t even go to the movies that much. But my wife and I did just see ‘Mamma Mia!’ and we loved it. It reminded me of a good old-time musical.”

His collection includes the westerns of John Ford, the suspense of Alfred Hitchcock, and the witty and stylish films of Preston Sturgis. He cites the filmmakers as his “three all-time favorites.”

Even when he can get an old movie on DVD, he says he prefers the original film.

“It is very similar to what people say about black-and-white photographs when they compare them to color. I think film offers a nuance that gets lost when a movie goes to DVD. I really do think there’s a difference and I appreciate film more.”

He often screens the movies on a collection of projectors he keeps in his basement, where it is not unusual for him to invite fellow film buffs for viewings. It was a tradition started by Sabini’s mentor, the late William K. Everson, a professor at the School of Visual Arts in New York who was reputed to have the largest collections of reel-to-reel films in the world. Sabini studied with him in college and they became friends.

“I am a big fan of what I call lost cinema, movies most people have never heard of,” says Sabini.

His courses vary. He might show Ford’s “How Green Was My Valley,” a favorite amplified by the fact he attended a screening at Everson’s New York City apartment with actor Roddy McDowell, who starred in the 1941 film. He might show the 1952 flick “Singin’ in the Rain” with Gene Kelly, “because it’s just a great, feel-good movie.” Or he may venture someplace more serious.
“One topic I love to teach is what I call Forbidden Hollywood, a course that includes talk movies made between 1929 and 1932, before strict censorship codes were invoked. It’s just interesting to see what made it onto the screen before censors got involved. A lot of it was really violent.

“There are a lot of old films on DVD, but that is not the case with every film. I like to delve into those things and see what they have to offer an audience. And the interesting thing is when you show those films to seniors, they end up teaching you things. They have historical references and perspective on the periods that I lack. They might notice a tin of cookies or a location and have specific memories about it. There will be a song playing in the background and they recognize it, but I don’t. They can tell you the significance. It becomes a wonderful sharing experience. I have learned more about the movies I love from them.”

“12 Angry Men” – Sat., Aug. 15 at 8:30PM

An all-star cast (including Martin Balsam, John Fiedler, Lee J. Cobb, E.G. Marshall, Jack Klugman, Jack Warden, and Henry Fonda) makes this a brilliantly acted, timeless masterpiece of character study in film.  I highly recommend “12 ANGRY MEN”.

Roger Ebert says,

In form, “12 Angry Men” is a courtroom drama. In purpose, it’s a crash course in those passages of the Constitution that promise defendants a fair trial and the presumption of innocence. It has a kind of stark simplicity: Apart from a brief setup and a briefer epilogue, the entire film takes place within a small New York City jury room, on “the hottest day of the year,” as 12 men debate the fate of a young defendant charged with murdering his father.

The film shows us nothing of the trial itself except for the judge’s perfunctory, almost bored, charge to the jury. His tone of voice indicates the verdict is a foregone conclusion. We hear neither prosecutor nor defense attorney, and learn of the evidence only second-hand, as the jurors debate it. Most courtroom movies feel it necessary to end with a clear-cut verdict. But “12 Angry Men” never states whether the defendant is innocent or guilty. It is about whether the jury has a reasonable doubt about his guilt.

The principle of reasonable doubt, the belief that a defendant is innocent until proven guilty, is one of the most enlightened elements of our Constitution, although many Americans have had difficulty in accepting it. “It’s an open and shut case,” snaps Juror No. 3 (Lee J. Cobb) as the jury first gathers in their claustrophobic little room. When the first ballot is taken, 10 of his fellow jurors agree, and there is only one holdout–Juror No. 8 (Henry Fonda).

This is a film where tension comes from personality conflict, dialogue and body language, not action; where the defendant has been glimpsed only in a single brief shot; where logic, emotion and prejudice struggle to control the field. It is a masterpiece of stylized realism–the style coming in the way the photography and editing comment on the bare bones of the content. Released in 1957, when Technicolor and lush production values were common, “12 Angry Men” was lean and mean. It got ecstatic reviews and a spread in Life magazine, but was a disappointment at the box office. Over the years it has found a constituency, however, and in a 2002 Internet Movie Database poll it was listed 23rd among the best films of all time.

The story is based on a television play by Reginald Rose, later made into a movie by Sidney Lumet, with Rose and Henry Fonda acting as co-producers and putting up their own money to finance it. It was Lumet’s first feature, although he was much experienced in TV drama, and the cinematography was by the veteran Boris Kaufman, whose credits (“On the Waterfront,” “Long Day’s Journey into Night”) show a skill for tightening the tension in dialogue exchanges.

The cast included only one bankable star, Fonda, but the other 11 actors were among the best then working in New York, including Martin Balsam, Lee J. Cobb, E. G. Marshall, Jack Klugman, Jack Warden, Ed Begley and Robert Webber. They smoke, they sweat, they swear, they sprawl, they stalk, they get angry.

In a length of only 95 minutes (it sometimes feels as if the movie is shot in real time), the jurors are all defined in terms of their personalities, backgrounds, occupations, prejudices and emotional tilts. Evidence is debated so completely that we feel we know as much as the jury does, especially about the old man who says he heard the murder and saw the defendant fleeing, and the lady across the street who says she saw it happen through the windows of a moving L train.

We see the murder weapon, a switch-blade knife, and hear the jurors debate the angle of the knife wound. We watch as Fonda imitates the shuffling step of the old man, a stroke victim, to see if he could have gotten to the door in time to see the murderer fleeing. In its ingenuity, in the way it balances one piece of evidence against another that seems contradictory, “12 Angry Men” is as meticulous as the summation of an Agatha Christie thriller.

But it is not about solving the crime. It is about sending a young man to die. The movie is timely in view of recent revelations that many Death Row convictions are based on contaminated evidence. “We’re talking about somebody’s life here,” the Fonda character says. “We can’t decide in five minutes. Supposing we’re wrong?”

The defendant, when we glimpse him, looks “ethnic” but of no specific group. He could be Italian, Turkish, Indian, Jewish, Arabic, Mexican. His eyes are ringed with dark circles, and he looks exhausted and frightened. In the jury room, some jurors make veiled references to “these people.” Finally Juror No. 10 (Ed Begley) begins a racist rant (“You know how these people lie. It’s born in them. They don’t know what the truth is. And let me tell you, they don’t need any real big reason to kill someone, either…”) As he continues, one juror after another stands up from the jury table and walks away, turning his back. Even those who think the defendant is guilty can’t sit and listen to Begley’s prejudice. The scene is one of the most powerful in the movie.

The vote, which begins as 11-to-1, shifts gradually. Although the movie is clearly in favor of the Fonda position, not all of those voting “guilty” are portrayed negatively. One of the key characters is Juror No. 4 (E. G. Marshall), a stockbroker wearing rimless glasses, who depends on pure logic and tries to avoid emotion altogether. Another Juror No. 7 (Jack Warden), who has tickets to a baseball game, grows impatient and changes his vote just to hurry things along. Juror No. 11 (George Voskovec), an immigrant who speaks with an accent, criticizes him: “Who tells you that you have the right to play like this with a man’s life?” Earlier, No. 11 was attacked as a foreigner: “They come over and in no time at all they’re telling us how to run the show.”

The visual strategy of the movie is discussed by Lumet in Making Movies, one of the most intelligent and informative books ever written about the cinema. In planning the movie, he says, a “lens plot” occurred to him: To make the room seem smaller as the story continued, he gradually changed to lenses of longer focal lengths, so that the backgrounds seemed to close in on the characters.

“In addition,” he writes, “I shot the first third of the movie above eye level, shot the second third at eye level and the last third from below eye level. In that way, toward the end the ceiling began to appear. Not only were the walls closing in, the ceiling was as well. The sense of increasing claustrophobia did a lot to raise the tension of the last part of the movie.” In the film’s last shot, he observes, he used a wide-angle lens “to let us finally breathe.”

The movie plays like a textbook for directors interested in how lens choices affect mood. By gradually lowering his camera, Lumet illustrates another principle of composition: A higher camera tends to dominate, a lower camera tends to be dominated. As the film begins we look down on the characters, and the angle suggests they can be comprehended and mastered. By the end, they loom over us, and we feel overwhelmed by the force of their passion. Lumet uses closeups rarely, but effectively: One man in particular–Juror No. 9 (Joseph Sweeney, the oldest man on the jury)–is often seen in full-frame, because he has a way of cutting to the crucial point and stating the obvious after it has eluded the others.

For Sidney Lumet, born in 1924, “12 Angry Men” was the beginning of a film career that has often sought controversial issues. Consider these titles from among his 43 films: “The Pawnbroker” (the Holocaust), “Fail-Safe” (accidental nuclear war), “Serpico” (police corruption), “Dog Day Afternoon” (homosexuality), “Network” (the decay of TV news), “The Verdict” (alcoholism and malpractice), “Daniel” (a son punished for the sins of his parents), “Running on Empty” (radical fugitives), and “Critical Care” (health care). There are also comedies and a musical (“The Wiz”). If Lumet is not among the most famous of American directors, that is only because he ranges so widely he cannot be categorized. Few filmmakers have been so consistently respectful of the audience’s intelligence.

“Casablanca” – Sat., Aug. 8 at 8:30PM

What can you say about one of the most outstanding films ever made?

Roger Ebert declares:

If we identify strongly with the characters in some movies, then it is no mystery that “Casablanca” is one of the most popular films ever made. It is about a man and a woman who are in love, and who sacrifice love for a higher purpose. This is immensely appealing; the viewer is not only able to imagine winning the love of Humphrey Bogart or Ingrid Bergman, but unselfishly renouncing it, as a contribution to the great cause of defeating the Nazis.

No one making “Casablanca” thought they were making a great movie. It was simply another Warner Bros. release. It was an “A list” picture, to be sure (Bogart, Bergman and Paul Henreid were stars, and no better cast of supporting actors could have been assembled on the Warners lot than Peter Lorre, Sidney Greenstreet, Claude Rains and Dooley Wilson). But it was made on a tight budget and released with small expectations. Everyone involved in the film had been, and would be, in dozens of other films made under similar circumstances, and the greatness of  “Casablanca” was largely the result of happy chance.

The screenplay was adapted from a play of no great consequence; memoirs tell of scraps of dialogue jotted down and rushed over to the set. What must have helped is that the characters were firmly established in the minds of the writers, and they were characters so close to the screen personas of the actors that it was hard to write dialogue in the wrong tone.

Humphrey Bogart played strong heroic leads in his career, but he was usually better as the disappointed, wounded, resentful hero. Remember him in “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” convinced the others were plotting to steal his gold. In “Casablanca,” he plays Rick Blaine, the hard-drinking American running a nightclub in Casablanca when Morocco was a crossroads for spies, traitors, Nazis and the French Resistance.

The opening scenes dance with comedy; the dialogue combines the cynical with the weary; wisecracks with epigrams. We see that Rick moves easily in a corrupt world. “What is your nationality?” the German Strasser asks him, and he replies, “I’m a drunkard.” His personal code: “I stick my neck out for nobody.”

Then “of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.” It is Ilsa Lund (Bergman), the woman Rick loved years earlier in Paris. Under the shadow of the German occupation, he arranged their escape, and believes she abandoned him — left him waiting in the rain at a train station with their tickets to freedom. Now she is with Victor Laszlo (Henreid), a legendary hero of the French Resistance.

All this is handled with great economy in a handful of shots that still, after many viewings, have the power to move me emotionally as few scenes ever have. The bar’s piano player, Sam (Wilson), a friend of theirs in Paris, is startled to see her. She asks him to play the song that she and Rick made their own, “As Time Goes By.” He is reluctant, but he does, and Rick comes striding angrily out of the back room (“I thought I told you never to play that song!”). Then he sees Ilsa, a dramatic musical chord marks their closeups, and the scene plays out in resentment, regret and the memory of a love that was real. (This scene is not as strong on a first viewing as on subsequent viewings, because the first time you see the movie you don’t yet know the story of Rick and Ilsa in Paris; indeed, the more you see it the more the whole film gains resonance.)

The plot, a trifle to hang the emotions on, involves letters of passage that will allow two people to leave Casablanca for Portugal and freedom. Rick obtained the letters from the wheedling little black-marketeer Ugarte (Peter Lorre). The sudden reappearance of Ilsa reopens all of his old wounds, and breaks his carefully cultivated veneer of neutrality and indifference. When he hears her story, he realizes she has always loved him. But now she is with Laszlo. Rick wants to use the letters to escape with Ilsa, but then, in a sustained sequence that combines suspense, romance and comedy as they have rarely been brought together on the screen, he contrives a situation in which Ilsa and Laszlo escape together, while he and his friend the police chief (Claude Rains) get away with murder. (“Round up the usual suspects.”)

What is intriguing is that none of the major characters is bad. Some are cynical, some lie, some kill, but all are redeemed. If you think it was easy for Rick to renounce his love for Ilsa–to place a higher value on Laszlo’s fight against Nazism — remember Forster’s famous comment, “If I were forced to choose between my country and my friend, I hope I would be brave enough to choose my friend.”

From a modern perspective, the film reveals interesting assumptions. Ilsa Lund’s role is basically that of a lover and helpmate to a great man; the movie’s real question is, which great man should she be sleeping with? There is actually no reason why Laszlo cannot get on the plane alone, leaving Ilsa in Casablanca with Rick, and indeed that is one of the endings that was briefly considered. But that would be all wrong; the “happy” ending would be tarnished by self-interest, while the ending we have allows Rick to be larger, to approach nobility (“it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world”). And it allows us, vicariously experiencing all of these things in the theater, to warm in the glow of his heroism.

In her closeups during this scene, Bergman’s face reflects confusing emotions. And well she might have been confused, since neither she nor anyone else on the film knew for sure until the final day who would get on the plane. Bergman played the whole movie without knowing how it would end, and this had the subtle effect of making all of her scenes more emotionally convincing; she could not tilt in the direction she knew the wind was blowing.

Stylistically, the film is not so much brilliant as absolutely sound, rock-solid in its use of Hollywood studio craftsmanship. The director, Michael Curtiz, and the writers (Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein and Howard Koch) all won Oscars. One of their key contributions was to show us that Rick, Ilsa and the others lived in a complex time and place. The richness of the supporting characters (Greenstreet as the corrupt club owner, Lorre as the sniveling cheat, Rains as the subtly homosexual police chief and minor characters like the young girl who will do anything to help her husband) set the moral stage for the decisions of the major characters. When this plot was remade in 1990 as “Havana,” Hollywood practices required all the big scenes to feature the big stars (Robert Redford and Lena Olin) and the film suffered as a result; out of context, they were more lovers than heroes.

Seeing the film over and over again, year after year, I find it never grows over-familiar. It plays like a favorite musical album; the more I know it, the more I like it. The black-and-white cinematography has not aged as color would. The dialogue is so spare and cynical it has not grown old-fashioned. Much of the emotional effect of “Casablanca” is achieved by indirection; as we leave the theater, we are absolutely convinced that the only thing keeping the world from going crazy is that the problems of three little people do after all amount to more than a hill of beans.

“Invasion of the Body Snatchers” Invades Our Big Screen on Sat., Aug. 1 at 8PM

Don Siegel’s cult masterpiece, interpreted as an allegory of both McCarthyism and Communism, is undoubtedly one of the screen’s most disturbing evocations of paranoia.

It stars Kevin McCarthy as Dr. Miles Binnell, a physician whose traumatized arrival in the emergency room of a San Francisco hospital leads the staff to believe he’s lost his mind. In a series of flashbacks, he unwinds a bizarre account of his last few days. After his return from a trip to rural Santa Mira, his nurse, Sally (Jean Willes), explains that his office has been flooded with patients who have made appointments yet never appeared. Former girlfriend Becky Driscoll (Dana Wynter) tells him that she’s unable to rid herself of the belief that the man claiming to be her uncle is an impostor. A hysterical young boy refuses to return home, claiming that his mother is not his mother. Miles’s concern over this pattern of incidents, temporarily allayed by some jargon from the town psychiatrist, is newly aroused when he gets a phone call from friend Jack Belicec (King Donovan), who begs him to come over and take a look at the strange mannequinlike figure that’s suddenly appeared on his pool table.

This exceptionally well written and directed fable, the ultimate comment on the subtly coercive conformity of the 1950s, may be Siegel’s best film, and it is undoubtedly one of the most exciting science fiction films ever made!

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