Screen Picks

by Sam Adams

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Published: Oct 25, 2006

The Dismembered (Sat., Oct. 28, 9 p.m., $10, Moore College of Art & Design, 20th and Race sts.) Ghouls? Goblins? Kid stuff. Watching a movie you made when you were 22 for the first time in 40-some years? Now that's scary.

Philadelphia cinephiles know Ralph Hirshorn as a nattily dressed fixture at screenings of the Chestnut Hill Film Group, where he has been running the projector since its inception 33 years ago. They may have heard that Hirshorn served a term at Columbia Pictures in the early 1960s, and that he's a card-carrying member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (which translates as "the people who vote on the Oscars"). But until this week, Hirshorn's sole foray into feature direction has been a closely guarded secret.

"It never has appeared on my resume," says Hirshorn of The Dismembered, which began production the day after his 1960 Yale graduation. Shot in an abandoned Chestnut Hill mansion, the film, in which a gang of hapless thieves hole up in a haunted house, was intended as a satire of 1950s horror cheapies, although Hirshorn isn't optimistic that the jokes have held up. "The thing I didn't understand at the time was that if you want to make a spoof of something, you should actually do it well," he chuckles. "You have to really scare people."

 

To be fair, the deck was stacked against him. Hirshorn's directorial experience was limited to a single prize-winning short, and the few members of his cast and crew who had any experience were gleaned from the TV puppet show Diver Dan. Add to that a $2,000 budget and a 10-day shooting schedule, and you can see there wasn't much time for polishing. "There was a genuine limit to what you could do," Hirshorn says. "You really had to move along." Nonetheless, Hirshorn feels that by day 10, he'd started to get the hang of things, and by the time the crew reconvened for an extra day of shooting, "we were really having fun."

After a few months, Hirshorn was off to Los Angeles, leaving the unedited footage in the hands of veteran editor Carl Lerner, a native Philadelphia whose credits already included 12 Angry Men and The Fugitive Kind. (He would go on to edit Klute and The Swimmer.) While Hirshorn wasn't fond of the producer's attempts to change The Dismembered into a wacky comedy — which included adding comic captions and changing the title to Oswald, You Botched It Again — he was impressed with Lerner's abilities. "I left them with a rather imperfect product," he says, "and much of what they did was pretty smart."

Hirshorn isn't entirely jazzed about his long-buried treasure being exhumed in front of an audience. (He visibly winced when I told him I hoped to see the movie before writing about it, and sounded relieved when I told him I couldn't.) But Secret Cinema curator Jay Schwartz, who will use The Dismembered to kick off a 10-hour horror-movie marathon, writes that it "serves as a lost time capsule, and shows what can be done with a low budget and a little imagination." Schwartz also calls it "the most obscure feature" in the 14-year history of Secret Cinema, an astonishing statement given Schwartz's gift for digging up the forgotten and unloved. But Hirshorn doesn't sound surprised by the claim. He estimates the number of living people who've seen the movie at 10, himself included. "It's hard to be sure," he adds. "I don't know exactly who's still alive."

A Page of Madness (Tue., Oct. 31, 8 p.m., $10, International House, 3701 Chestnut St.) Teinosuke Kinugasa's 1926 Japanese silent may not be a horror movie per se, but it's certainly frightening enough to merit its All-Hallow's Eve booking at International House. Thought lost for decades until the director discovered a copy in his garden shed, A Page of Madness is an anomaly in Japanese cinema, an imagistic nightmare that might have influenced manic stylists like Kinji Fukasuku and Seijun Suzuki had they actually been able to see it. The movie's story is nigh-impossible to follow, but by consensus it involves a retired seaman who takes a job as a janitor in an insane asylum to be closer to his wife, who has been committed after drowning (or maybe attempting to drown) their young daughter. What it amounts to is a dazzling compendium of camera trickery, wedding the filmic experimentation of the early surrealists to the frenzy of Shock Corridor. Although Saturday's screening is on video, it's worth turning out for two reasons: Page is only available as a low-grade bootleg, and live accompaniment will be provided by N_JP, an ensemble blending traditional Japanese and Western instrumentation, supplemented for the performance by Esper Helena Espvall and electronic noise-maker Dave Smolen, and conducted by ex-RélÃ¥che director Thaddeus Squire.

Misc. Picks The Colonial's screening of Diabolique will have Phoenixvillians jumping out of their skins (Sun., 2 p.m.). More on I-House's Quay Brothers retrospective next week, but if you missed The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes at the Philadelphia Film Festival, don't miss the reprise (Wed., 7 p.m.).

(sam@citypaper.net)

 

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