The Strange Awakening

With films like this to his credit, it's surprising the name Montgomery Tully isn't better known. On the evidence of this and several others of his movies (Master Spy and Out of the Fog), Tully deserves to be ranked just marginally higher than the notorious Edward D. Wood. There's one important difference, though. Wood's films were so bad they're hilarious. Tully's are just bad.

Tully specialised in the cheap 'quota quickies' that did so much to damage the reputation of the British film industry, and Strange Awakening serves to illustrate exactly how that damage was done. It's dull, predictable, stagy, wordy, badly scripted and poorly realised in just about every department.

The film begins in France (oops, there goes the budget) where a man (Lex Barker) is saying his farewells to a woman in a preposterous hat (Monica Grey). Driving back from the airfield, Barker gives a lift to a hitchhiker (Richard Molinas) who subsequently attempts to steal his car. A struggle ensues and Barker rolls downhill, bumping his head on a tree and knocking himself out (this needs to be seen to be believed).

When he comes to, Barker's character is suffering from amnesia. He is in a luxurious house, where several women and a doctor (Peter Dyneley) are on hand to fill in the gaps in his missing memory. Barker is, it would appear, missing heir Gordy Friend, a well-known lush whose poet father is a leading figure in a temperance-styled society. Friend senior having recently died, 'Gordy' is required to sign a document and recite a piece of his father's intolerant verse in order to complete the transfer of the Friend estate. Ah, if only it were that simple...

To add further plot detail would be at the risk of 'spoiling' the movie for anyone who hasn't seen it (though it could be argued that Tully did a good enough job of spoiling the film himself, which consists mostly of protracted exposition and tortured plot contrivances). Whatever the merits of Hugh Wheeler's original novel (and I suspect they are few), Strange Awakening does not impress as a movie and would probably have been better left in out-of-print obscurity. Still, it's not likely to be bothering the TV schedules or DVD labels anytime soon, so you're unlikely to find your sleep disturbed by this turkey.

If you watch the trailer on the Network disc you will save yourselves about 77 minutes of boredom.There is so little action.When it does come it is filmed at night.Now that was fine if you were watching it in a cinema,but watching it on tv means you are peering at the screen.In any event the plot is a variation on a very old chestnut.

Recently read the book Puzzle For Fiends and was interested to see how this adaptation compared. The scene has been switched from southern California to the south of France, but the rich suffocating decor of the Friend's mansion is accurately conveyed and for a low-budget movie, veteran Wilfred Arnold's sets are notable. One of the characters describes the rest of the Friend family as fiends at one point, a play on words which accounts somewhat for the alternative title. Casting is excellent, but the script ignores the rivalry between the glamorous duo of Selena and Marnie and the question of who is the most devious, accounting for a considerable amount of tension in the book. And for such a wordy film the full significance of the importance of the poem reading before the hellfire cult leader for example, is not adequately put over. It's watchable, but the audience, the cast, and the art director deserved something amounting to more.

This film stars Lex Barker, who in 1949 became Tarzan in succession to Johnny Weissmuller and made a succession of Tarzan films. He was very tall, handsome, and impressive, and was in constant demand as a leading man in B films (he appeared in 81 films). He died at the age of only 54 of a heart attack in the street in Manhattan. He does very well in the lead role in this film, though the acting laurels go to Lisa Gastoni as 'Marny'. I have recently praised her as an underrated actress in my review of WRONG NUMBER (1959, see my review). Carole Mathews and Nora Swinburne do very well in their creepy roles also. As someone who likes amnesia films and tries to see all of them, I was disappointed that this one was so corny. Lex Barker lives between Nice and Cannes. He is attacked and knocked unconscious by a thief whom he picked up as a hitchhiker, and he suffers total amnesia. This is made worse by the fact that he has no identification on him as a result of the robbery. A doctor at the hospital says he knows who he is, and he takes him to a huge villa for private nursing. But this is all a scam, for Barker's amnesia is convenient in enabling the household of women there, together with the dishonest doctor, to persuade him that he is the head of their family. The motive is to pretend that he is that person in order to complete the process of inheriting a large amount of money and property. Then they would get rid of him. Barker slowly begins to realize that something is wrong, and the plot thickens. It is a pity that the film is not at all convincing, and is just a run of the mill low budget 'product' directed without a trace of inspiration by Montgomery Tully, who did a much better job the year before in directing THE HYPNOTIST (1957, see my review). In the 1950s, Tully was directing as many as ten films a year! No wonder they were not all good, as he had become a mere factory hand. He must have sleepwalked through THE STRANGE AWAKENING, without himself waking up. And I bet he had total amnesia for half the films he had made the year before. We can perhaps be forgiven for not knowing much about most of them.

Strange Awakening (1958)

First off: this is a bad B-movie with some fun quirks. That will thrill a few of you and chase the rest away. Good!

The plot, as improbable as it is, has some curious elements, the main one being, what would you do if you woke up and remembered nothing? And started to suspect that the people around you were creating a false history for you? And a few cracks in their story started to show? And you had two or even three attractive women loitering about? And there was a lot of money attached to it all? And your life was in danger?

Well, this movie comes at the nadir of Hollywood and British movie-making, and it's a horribly contrived formula movie that pales next to Twilight Zone and other B-movie dramas with psychological twists. Even the main character's last names are pushy: Friend and Chance, not to mention the burly Swede name Sven. The opening sequence where our hero picks up a hitchhiker and then gets whacked in the head by him is irrelevant, except for the whack. And the amnesia. Then the hospital scene, the mother (so-called) at bedside, and the realization that all is not right. But hey, there are those pretty girls, and one of them is bound to sympathize with you and fall into your arms, right?

And it's only an hour long. You might think of it as just an old t.v. episode where your expectations are different. It bustles along with mediocre acting, reasonable filming, crack editing, and some cool and brief montage effects (including an airplane propellor merging into a tabletop fan). And the original title, Female Fiends, is pretty good, though there are Male Fiends on hand, too (remember Sven).

Director Monty Tully isn't about to have a boxed set of his work, but it's great fun just to read the titles of all the movies he made this same singular year, 1958: The Diplomatic Corpse, The Electronic Monster, Female Fiends, Print of Death, Crime of Honour, The Crossroad Gallows, The Long Knife, Man with a Gun, and I Only Arsked! What a year.

Strange Awakening, here before you, isn't all bad!

But mostly. Enjoy it in proportion.