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It turns out that I find it very difficult to write critically about Curtis Harrington's Night Tide (1961) because so many aspects of this strange little cult movie are like things I have written, read, or dreamed. There is an easy shorthand summary: it's like a maritime version of Cat People (1942) with a slightly clumsier ending. Much as I love Cat People and understand it working its way into a person's head, Night Tide deserves better than to be written off as an experimental homage. It's not a horror film, although it drifts at times toward being one; at others it drifts toward romance, weird tale, and slice of life on the fringes of the beat era. The title is taken from Poe. The black-and-white cinematography alternates between aimlessly naturalistic and moodily expressionist and the score is heavily weighted toward woodwinds and flutes, like a child's sing-song by the summer sea. The cast includes exactly one actor I've heard of and one occultist I didn't realize had made any movies at all. Let's back up a moment.
In terms of plot, the events of Night Tide are simple and symbolic enough to resemble the cards of the Tarot reading performed for one of the protagonists halfway through. A young sailor comes ashore and falls instantly for a beautiful and mysterious woman; he finds that she makes a living as a mermaid in a carnival sideshow, combing her hair under glass with an artificial tail on, but believes herself to be a descendant of the Sirens, dangerous to men and destined to return to the sea someday. Everything seems to confirm it—the drunken storytelling of her adoptive father, the ongoing police investigation into the drowning deaths of her previous two boyfriends, the prominence of the old Rider-Waite Moon in the resident clairvoyant's Tarot deck. The woman herself is drawn to the sea, frightened of it, clinging to the sailor, warning him away; neither of them seems able to break the spell of a summer romance as strong as undertow. The tides are rising. The moon is growing full. One way or another, the mystery has to resolve, but the audience has been taking bets since the first invocation of siren song on how many of the characters are going to survive the denouement. We were both surprised, but I'll get to that under the cut-text.
In practice, I keep coming back to adjectives like "minimalist," "alienating," and "hypnotic." The film's not even ninety minutes, but it does odd things with time; the moon is the only temporal marker in what feels otherwise like one endless summer weekend. Much of the dialogue is elliptical and realistic in that it is conversational filler, noise rather than signal; there are a few key speeches, but the film achieves its best results by atmosphere and suggestion. What keeps it from all diffusing into a weightless swoon of sun-bleached piers and dream sequences and eccentric character turns are the two central performances and the setting. As the novice sailor Johnny Drake, a shockingly young Dennis Hopper—all fair hair and creased brows, tight-T-shirted shoulders a little uncertainly hunched—is both yearningly innocent and itchily sexual; a Colorado boy, he joined the Navy to see the world but admits that after a year he's only been "as far as the Hawaiian Islands." His insistent attraction to a woman he followed home from a jazz club seems to bewilder him; he breaks up in nervous laughter over breakfast, chafes uneasily at his arms during an apparently idyllic date by the sea. He doesn't have the depth of experience or imagination to understand the fears and the desires that prey on his lover's mind, but he keeps trying naively and bravely to reassure her, the rational virgin of Angela Carter's "The Lady of the House of Love" transplanted from the vampires' Romania to the West Coast of cool jazz and seaside fairgrounds. With her dark-tangling hair and her broad-eyed archaic smile, Linda Lawson makes Mora more than an object of adoration and incomprehension; she speaks of her sense of kinship with the sea in terms that resonate powerfully with anyone who has ever gazed out aching from the shore. "Because I feel the sea water in my veins. Because I listen to the roar of the sea and it speaks to me like a mother's voice. The tide pulls at my heart, the face of the moon fills my soul with a strange longing . . ." She is frank about the first layer of her sea-yearning; the second reveals itself through behaviors just slightly stranger than an isolated childhood and a carny lifestyle should account for. A sentence of spoken Greek in a nightclub can freeze her; she stumbles in a nighttime dance and falls terrified at the sight of a black-veiled woman with a proud, severe face watching from just beyond the reach of the lights. It is not the return to the sea that she fears, but the predatory heritage she knows impels a siren as strongly as the moon the tides.1 Losing Johnny pales beside the thought of losing herself.
And it is not some vague fairytale world in which this story is taking place; it's Santa Monica and Venice, California in 1960. The location shooting grounds the fantasia instantly in a time and place observed as casually and meticulously as a documentary. When Johnny comes ashore on leave, the neon-lit midway he wanders through belongs to the now-defunct Pacific Ocean Park, as does the amusement pier where Mora works. They meet in a basement jazz club called the Blue Grotto where a combo fronted by flautist Paul Horn is playing to an audience of beatnik types. When she dances on the beach, Chaino is playing the bongos. Mora's adoptive father, the carnival talker Captain Sam Murdock (Gavin Muir, channeling every shady British raconteur who ever cadged drinks in a Conrad novel), lives in a crumbling Italianate palazzo in Venice, surrounded by the detritus of his travels; he unsettles Johnny with lush explanations of his more gruesome trophies, like the preserved hand of an Arabian thief, so we believe him as the kind of jackdaw collector who might think himself clever to camouflage a real mermaid in the spangles and bally of a fake one. Mora lives over the antique carousel, her balcony overlooking the beach; her tiny, airy apartment is filled and furnished with sea-things, the walls hung with fishing nets and brittle starfish and polished shells turning like suncatchers in the breeze, delicate fans of coral set on the table beside a vase full of sea-sticks and wave-tumbled stones. A little porcelain statue of a siren sits on her bookshelf, the classical bird-woman with a lyre in her arms. She serves Johnny a breakfast of fresh mackerel and promises to find him some sea urchins next: "It's like a wonderful ocean fruit. You scoop them out like a pomegranate." The shoestring budget consistently works in the film's favor. Because there's no room for a cast of dozens, Johnny and Mora often seem to exist in their own private world, dislocated from the crowds of the amusement park and even the ordinary denizens of Venice Beach. We see them; we know they exist. The carnival is not a seedy underworld, but sunlit and summer-populated. Yet somehow, wherever Johnny and Mora go, they're by themselves.2
( But I never counted on the enormous power of her own independent will. ) It's difficult to shake the feeling that earlier drafts might have ended more subtly or at least less joltingly, but I can't make any claims either way without reading the original short story, Harrington's "The Secrets of the Sea."
But then there are all the scenes that are not subtle, but so evocative that it doesn't matter; they flow in and out of the characters' daily life as if everything around them is as fluid and mutable as a splash of foam or a story. Vividly filmed as they are, Johnny's nightmares3 are in some ways less uncanny than the night he wakes to find Mora gone and follows her wet footprints much farther than seems plausible, all the way down the pier and underneath the boardwalk and into a maze of pilings and the white-and-black tide roaring in, where his voice echoes back at him as if mocking voices are calling it and at first, when she cries his name, he cannot even see her. At its best, the experience of watching Night Tide is like falling asleep by the ocean, waking with the sun strange in your eyes and no idea how much time has passed in the heat as the waves rush and sigh. It could be the same afternoon or a summer later. You dreamed something; it still has you caught in its churn and drag, tumbling half-breathless, and nothing objectively more extraordinary has happened than a blink of time beside the sea. The sea can be extraordinary indeed.
1. Harrington takes enormous liberties with the myth of the Sirens, but I find the results intriguing and oddly Lovecraftian. As Captain Murdock boozily tells it, the Sirens were "a strange race of sea-people, half human, half creatures of the sea . . . The female of the species were known popularly as mermaids." They linger in the Greek islands, unrecognized in these prosaic days; Mora was one such, an abandoned child on Mykonos whom Murdock rescued and brought home, first to England, then to America, not knowing what kind of changeling had grown close to his heart. "I found her on an island. I didn't know then what she was to become. I didn't know then that she belonged to that ancient race. She's a monster!" At the full moon, he warns Johnny, the sea-people kill.
2. The exception are the other carnies, most notably the carousel operator (Tom Dillon) and his lovestruck granddaughter (Luana Anders, offering an earnest blonde all-American alternative to snaky-haired Greek Mora) and Marjorie Eaton's Madame Romanovitch, who has possibly the best Tarot scene I've seen in a movie. She lays the cards out; she explains their configuration and significance; it makes sense as a reading, not merely as a dramatic convenience, and at no point does she express shock or horror over what she sees, merely regret that she has to tell Johnny that he is in danger. She asks him not to call her a fortune-teller. "It's so vulgar. I prefer to be known as a cheiromancer or clairvoyant."
3. He dreams of her twice, each time a different fear: once she transforms in his arms into a monstrous clawed octopus and begins to devour him, the second time she is merely herself in the surf of a rocky shore, her fish's tail flashing, her dark hair wild, and she laughs at him and lets go his hand and plunges away into the wave. The octopus is a tremendously bogus effect and Dennis Hopper sells every second of it. The second dream is just wordless and beautiful and maybe the truth.
It turns out that I find it very difficult to write critically about Curtis Harrington's Night Tide (1961) because so many aspects of this strange little cult movie are like things I have written, read, or dreamed. There is an easy shorthand summary: it's like a maritime version of Cat People (1942) with a slightly clumsier ending. Much as I love Cat People and understand it working its way into a person's head, Night Tide deserves better than to be written off as an experimental homage. It's not a horror film, although it drifts at times toward being one; at others it drifts toward romance, weird tale, and slice of life on the fringes of the beat era. The title is taken from Poe. The black-and-white cinematography alternates between aimlessly naturalistic and moodily expressionist and the score is heavily weighted toward woodwinds and flutes, like a child's sing-song by the summer sea. The cast includes exactly one actor I've heard of and one occultist I didn't realize had made any movies at all. Let's back up a moment.
In terms of plot, the events of Night Tide are simple and symbolic enough to resemble the cards of the Tarot reading performed for one of the protagonists halfway through. A young sailor comes ashore and falls instantly for a beautiful and mysterious woman; he finds that she makes a living as a mermaid in a carnival sideshow, combing her hair under glass with an artificial tail on, but believes herself to be a descendant of the Sirens, dangerous to men and destined to return to the sea someday. Everything seems to confirm it—the drunken storytelling of her adoptive father, the ongoing police investigation into the drowning deaths of her previous two boyfriends, the prominence of the old Rider-Waite Moon in the resident clairvoyant's Tarot deck. The woman herself is drawn to the sea, frightened of it, clinging to the sailor, warning him away; neither of them seems able to break the spell of a summer romance as strong as undertow. The tides are rising. The moon is growing full. One way or another, the mystery has to resolve, but the audience has been taking bets since the first invocation of siren song on how many of the characters are going to survive the denouement. We were both surprised, but I'll get to that under the cut-text.
In practice, I keep coming back to adjectives like "minimalist," "alienating," and "hypnotic." The film's not even ninety minutes, but it does odd things with time; the moon is the only temporal marker in what feels otherwise like one endless summer weekend. Much of the dialogue is elliptical and realistic in that it is conversational filler, noise rather than signal; there are a few key speeches, but the film achieves its best results by atmosphere and suggestion. What keeps it from all diffusing into a weightless swoon of sun-bleached piers and dream sequences and eccentric character turns are the two central performances and the setting. As the novice sailor Johnny Drake, a shockingly young Dennis Hopper—all fair hair and creased brows, tight-T-shirted shoulders a little uncertainly hunched—is both yearningly innocent and itchily sexual; a Colorado boy, he joined the Navy to see the world but admits that after a year he's only been "as far as the Hawaiian Islands." His insistent attraction to a woman he followed home from a jazz club seems to bewilder him; he breaks up in nervous laughter over breakfast, chafes uneasily at his arms during an apparently idyllic date by the sea. He doesn't have the depth of experience or imagination to understand the fears and the desires that prey on his lover's mind, but he keeps trying naively and bravely to reassure her, the rational virgin of Angela Carter's "The Lady of the House of Love" transplanted from the vampires' Romania to the West Coast of cool jazz and seaside fairgrounds. With her dark-tangling hair and her broad-eyed archaic smile, Linda Lawson makes Mora more than an object of adoration and incomprehension; she speaks of her sense of kinship with the sea in terms that resonate powerfully with anyone who has ever gazed out aching from the shore. "Because I feel the sea water in my veins. Because I listen to the roar of the sea and it speaks to me like a mother's voice. The tide pulls at my heart, the face of the moon fills my soul with a strange longing . . ." She is frank about the first layer of her sea-yearning; the second reveals itself through behaviors just slightly stranger than an isolated childhood and a carny lifestyle should account for. A sentence of spoken Greek in a nightclub can freeze her; she stumbles in a nighttime dance and falls terrified at the sight of a black-veiled woman with a proud, severe face watching from just beyond the reach of the lights. It is not the return to the sea that she fears, but the predatory heritage she knows impels a siren as strongly as the moon the tides.1 Losing Johnny pales beside the thought of losing herself.
And it is not some vague fairytale world in which this story is taking place; it's Santa Monica and Venice, California in 1960. The location shooting grounds the fantasia instantly in a time and place observed as casually and meticulously as a documentary. When Johnny comes ashore on leave, the neon-lit midway he wanders through belongs to the now-defunct Pacific Ocean Park, as does the amusement pier where Mora works. They meet in a basement jazz club called the Blue Grotto where a combo fronted by flautist Paul Horn is playing to an audience of beatnik types. When she dances on the beach, Chaino is playing the bongos. Mora's adoptive father, the carnival talker Captain Sam Murdock (Gavin Muir, channeling every shady British raconteur who ever cadged drinks in a Conrad novel), lives in a crumbling Italianate palazzo in Venice, surrounded by the detritus of his travels; he unsettles Johnny with lush explanations of his more gruesome trophies, like the preserved hand of an Arabian thief, so we believe him as the kind of jackdaw collector who might think himself clever to camouflage a real mermaid in the spangles and bally of a fake one. Mora lives over the antique carousel, her balcony overlooking the beach; her tiny, airy apartment is filled and furnished with sea-things, the walls hung with fishing nets and brittle starfish and polished shells turning like suncatchers in the breeze, delicate fans of coral set on the table beside a vase full of sea-sticks and wave-tumbled stones. A little porcelain statue of a siren sits on her bookshelf, the classical bird-woman with a lyre in her arms. She serves Johnny a breakfast of fresh mackerel and promises to find him some sea urchins next: "It's like a wonderful ocean fruit. You scoop them out like a pomegranate." The shoestring budget consistently works in the film's favor. Because there's no room for a cast of dozens, Johnny and Mora often seem to exist in their own private world, dislocated from the crowds of the amusement park and even the ordinary denizens of Venice Beach. We see them; we know they exist. The carnival is not a seedy underworld, but sunlit and summer-populated. Yet somehow, wherever Johnny and Mora go, they're by themselves.2
( But I never counted on the enormous power of her own independent will. ) It's difficult to shake the feeling that earlier drafts might have ended more subtly or at least less joltingly, but I can't make any claims either way without reading the original short story, Harrington's "The Secrets of the Sea."
But then there are all the scenes that are not subtle, but so evocative that it doesn't matter; they flow in and out of the characters' daily life as if everything around them is as fluid and mutable as a splash of foam or a story. Vividly filmed as they are, Johnny's nightmares3 are in some ways less uncanny than the night he wakes to find Mora gone and follows her wet footprints much farther than seems plausible, all the way down the pier and underneath the boardwalk and into a maze of pilings and the white-and-black tide roaring in, where his voice echoes back at him as if mocking voices are calling it and at first, when she cries his name, he cannot even see her. At its best, the experience of watching Night Tide is like falling asleep by the ocean, waking with the sun strange in your eyes and no idea how much time has passed in the heat as the waves rush and sigh. It could be the same afternoon or a summer later. You dreamed something; it still has you caught in its churn and drag, tumbling half-breathless, and nothing objectively more extraordinary has happened than a blink of time beside the sea. The sea can be extraordinary indeed.
1. Harrington takes enormous liberties with the myth of the Sirens, but I find the results intriguing and oddly Lovecraftian. As Captain Murdock boozily tells it, the Sirens were "a strange race of sea-people, half human, half creatures of the sea . . . The female of the species were known popularly as mermaids." They linger in the Greek islands, unrecognized in these prosaic days; Mora was one such, an abandoned child on Mykonos whom Murdock rescued and brought home, first to England, then to America, not knowing what kind of changeling had grown close to his heart. "I found her on an island. I didn't know then what she was to become. I didn't know then that she belonged to that ancient race. She's a monster!" At the full moon, he warns Johnny, the sea-people kill.
2. The exception are the other carnies, most notably the carousel operator (Tom Dillon) and his lovestruck granddaughter (Luana Anders, offering an earnest blonde all-American alternative to snaky-haired Greek Mora) and Marjorie Eaton's Madame Romanovitch, who has possibly the best Tarot scene I've seen in a movie. She lays the cards out; she explains their configuration and significance; it makes sense as a reading, not merely as a dramatic convenience, and at no point does she express shock or horror over what she sees, merely regret that she has to tell Johnny that he is in danger. She asks him not to call her a fortune-teller. "It's so vulgar. I prefer to be known as a cheiromancer or clairvoyant."
3. He dreams of her twice, each time a different fear: once she transforms in his arms into a monstrous clawed octopus and begins to devour him, the second time she is merely herself in the surf of a rocky shore, her fish's tail flashing, her dark hair wild, and she laughs at him and lets go his hand and plunges away into the wave. The octopus is a tremendously bogus effect and Dennis Hopper sells every second of it. The second dream is just wordless and beautiful and maybe the truth.
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