Marea nocturna

Sailor on shore-leave meets and falls for a mysterious woman who works as a carnival mermaid on the California coast. Is she a neurotic or actually a descendant of the Sirens? Moody mystery isn't quite the thriller it was advertised as. It has a straightforward narrative and very few actual surprises, but there are surreal bits, a great beatnik party on the beach, terrific black-and-white cinematography, and handsome, pre-hippie Dennis Hopper at his most grounded and friendly (and polite!). The film hopes to absorb its audience by means of atmosphere and little red herrings, not big shocks. I admired the film, but it's not to every taste. **1/2 from ****

Released one year prior to the atmospheric, surreal horror classic "Carnival of Souls," "Night Tide" is a similarly bizarre film that radiates an odd effect. Johnny (a young Dennis Hopper) falls in love with Mora (Linda Lawson), a sideshow performer who might also be a mermaid with a penchant for murdering her lovers. The performances are adequate and realistic, with Hopper conveying a proper balance of lovestruck awe and confusion; Lawson is fittingly remote and enigmatic. Writer-director Curtis Harrington builds a fair amount of suspense and limits the action to several effective dream sequences, thereby retaining a surreal mood. Not as wild as Jack Hill's "Spider Baby," nor as subtly brilliant as "Carnival of Souls," "Night Tide" is a diverting in-between that's worth a look.

Don't get me wrong... I don't think this is a great achievement in film making.

I stumbled across this movie on late night TV, back in the early days of UHF, when, at 13 or 14, it was very exciting to me to have new channels that were so low budget that they showed things that, in the light of mainstream, 3 channel, VHF programming, seemed very much like they were being beamed in from another galaxy.

Through the lens of adolescent angst that I saw it through, this is a movie about unbearable loneliness, brilliantly captured by Dennis Hopper, whose only way out of his loneliness is through a beautiful woman from another world that he can't fully understand.

Like Kabuki theater on Darvon, he moves through the shadows of this overfiltered dreamworld of seaside 1960. The real monster is loneliness, and unlike most horror movies, the monster wins this one.

The setting, the off season seaside resort (and it could have been any, not just Venice Beach) was perfect, being there by oneself is possibly the loneliest experience one could have, hinting at a livelier, fun=filled world that, because of time, is unattainable.

It represents to me, maybe the first "indie" film I saw and recognized as one, "indie" in the original sense of a movie that was not made to be a box office hit, but because someone HAD to make a movie about something they felt strongly about, or had an artistic vision that had to be shared. Many of the earlier examples of these movies found their way onto UHF, because they were cheap to rent. But they got me hooked, and as soon as I could drive, sought out the art theaters in nearby towns that showed what was then called "underground" cinema, Kenneth Anger, John Waters (pre-flamingoes) I am Curious (Yellow and Blue.) These films are not as enchanting to me now, but then, none of them ever lived up to Night Tide for me.

For sentimental reasons, this has always been, and will always be, one of my very favorite movies.

Though it is a small production, it is interesting in the way it deals with the myth and mystery of the sea and its lore. We are purposely given sketchy information about the carnival mermaid who may in fact be a siren luring the lonely sailor nearly to his doom.

A very young Hopper plays the sailor, and Lawson is sufficiently enchanting to make us believe that she is more than just a girl wearing a fake fishtail. The film has a TWILIGHT ZONE quality to it, leaving the viewer wondering at the end.

I had long been interested in checking out this low-budget fantasy; as soon as I learned of writer/director Harrington’s passing, I ordered it and another horror title of his – RUBY (1977). I was afraid that the 1999 Image/Milestone DVD (in a snap case!) would have gone OOP by this time, but I got lucky. Anyway, I loved the film: it was Harrington’s first feature-length effort (and the best that I’ve watched from him); of his remaining work, I’m most interested in the psychological thriller GAMES (1967) – which has never been shown in my neck of the woods and, regrettably, is still M.I.A. on DVD – though I should be getting to his sci-fi concoction QUEEN OF BLOOD (1966) fairly soon.

While watching NIGHT TIDE, I was reminded of other arty (though small-scale and independently-produced) cult horror items from that creative era – such as DEMENTIA (1953), CARNIVAL OF SOULS (1962) and INCUBUS (1965). Richard Valley perceptively remarks in the DVD liner notes that the film presents what is probably cinema’s only wicked mermaid: the aquatic legend at the core of the narrative – with the compulsion it places on the girl concerned to kill her current lover, and the intermittent appearance of a mysterious older member of the ‘species’ (who greets her in a foreign tongue) – is clearly influenced by CAT PEOPLE (1942), the Val Lewton/Jacques Tourneur classic (incidentally, lead Dennis Hopper is seen here following the so-called ‘Water Witch’ played by Cameron, an eccentric figure with artistic and occult leanings popular around this time – could this be an inversion of the celebrated night-time stalking scene on New York streets from CAT PEOPLE?). However, the film can also be defined Hitchcockian – sharing its enigmatic female lead with VERTIGO (1958) and featuring a PSYCHO (1960)-ish explanatory ending.

The cast is interesting: it’s refreshing to see Hopper playing wholesome, rather than one of his trademark psychotics; Linda Lawson is quite striking as the mermaid girl; Gavin Muir is imposing in an ambiguous role (originally intended for Peter Lorre!); and Luana Anders likable in the small but touching part of ‘the other woman’. Thanks to its dreamy cinematography by Vilis Lapenieks (though an uncredited Floyd Crosby did the studio interiors), the evocative carnival/sea-side setting (partly filmed at Venice Beach, which I visited a number of times while in L.A. in late 2005) and a fine score by David Raksin, the film is turned into a hypnotic mood piece. Especially effective are the quirky scene early on in which seagulls are compulsively attracted to Lawson’s bizarrely-decorated apartment (thus anticipating Hitchcock’s own THE BIRDS [1963]!); the hero’s nightmares which see Lawson metamorphose first into an octopus and then into Cameron herself; the scene in which Hopper finds Lawson mysteriously tied to the pier; and the suspenseful climax (following the girl’s ‘inexplicable’ underwater attack on Hopper, the latter confronts Muir at his tent and is shown Lawson’s drowned body, while being threatened with a gun – then we cut away and, on resuming the scene, find that Muir has been disarmed).

A quotation from Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabel Lee”, in which the title is mentioned, concludes the film; incidentally, Roger Corman (director of several cinematic adaptations of the author’s work) helped raise finance for it – and Harrington himself twice filmed “The Fall Of The House Of Usher” as a short subject, made at a distance of some 60 years from one another! By the way, while NIGHT TIDE was first shown at the 1961 Venice Film Festival, it wasn’t officially released in the U.S. until 1963; as if to make up for this, Harrington proudly states that the film has often been revived over the years – chiefly through the copy he personally donated to Henri Langlois of the Cinematheque Francaise!

The accompanying Audio Commentary is something of a letdown, being a laidback conversation between star and director (who have remained friends): however, both tend to be sketchy about several of the details pertaining to the shooting – and, too often, lazily resort to merely pointing out the locations used for any given scene!

Finally, both the “DVD Drive-in” and “DVD Savant” reviews mention Harrington’s early short work as being in a similar vein to his debut feature; one wonders whether this will ever be more readily available, particularly now that the director’s gone.