Horrors of the Casting Couch

The only way to become a star is to get under 

a good director and work your way up.

I.

When researching a recent post on the 1959 film Horrors of the Black Museum, I came across this publicity photo featuring one of the female stars, June Cunningham, and writer-producer Herman Cohen getting an eyeful of the former in costume and presumably on set.

Clearly, it was meant at the time to be humorous, in a saucy postcard or Benny Hill-like manner. But today, when so many things are viewed differently, it does seem slightly troubling - and, indeed, will be for some members of the Me Too generation far more shocking and horrifying than anything that appears in the movie itself. 


II.

Of course, games involving the complex interplay of sex and power have a long history in the entertainment industry and the central role of the casting couch - upon which so many promises are made (by mostly male directors and producers) and so many favours granted (by mostly pretty young starlets) - has been an open secret from the beginning (so much so that casting couch has become a well-known euphemism for the sexual politics of showbiz and a popular pornographic trope).   

It would be wrong, however, to always interpret this phenomenon reactively and think only in moral terms of abuse and exploitation, vulnerability and victimhood. For one thing, power isn't something that one party exclusively possesses and the other doesn't; nor does power always express itself in a base or vulgar manner. Further, as Foucault recognised, power doesn't only weigh on us as a form of repressive violence; it also induces pleasures and is a great productive network running through the entire social body.

Looking at the above photograph, we might also recall Baudrillard's work on seduction and the revenge of the object that curdles conventional notions of agency, consent, and truth. If nothing else, it's important to know that appearances are deceptive, situations reversible, and tables can often be turned in the blink of a gouged out eye.

Thus who can really say who is fucking with whom here? Cohen wears the trousers; but Cunningham has the ability to charm the pants off him ...  

Horrors of the Black Museum (1959)

Michael Gough gets to grips with June Cunningham in a 

publicity still for Horrors of the Black Museum (1959)

When the Museum of Modern Art inducts a British horror film from the 1950s into its collection at the behest of Martin Scorsese, you simply have to watch it when the opportunity arises, as it did, the other night, on Talking Pictures TV (the vintage film and television channel available on Freeview).

Horrors of the Black Museum (dir. Arthur Crabtree, 1959), is the first in what critic David Pirie dubbed Anglo-Amalgamated's Sadean trilogy; i.e., movies that placed an emphasis on sexual violence and cruelty, in contrast to the supernatural elements found in the Hammer horrors of the same era [1]. 

Written and produced by Herman (I Was a Teenage Werewolf) Cohen, the film exploits his personal fascination with the criminal memorabilia collected in Scotland Yard's so-called Black Museum and stars English actor Michael Gough as the mad, misogynistic murderer Edmond Bancroft: No woman can hold her tongue! They're a vicious, unreliable breed!

Originally, Cohen had wanted either Vincent Price or Orson Welles for the role, but the Hollywood stars would have demanded fees way outside of budget. And so Gough got the part and his scenery-chewing performance betrays the same bitter resentment of the evil cripple that he later demonstrates as the wheelchair-bound mad scientist, Dr. Clement Armstrong, in a famous episode of The Avengers [2].

Whilst the ingenius murders - committed with spiked binoculars, a guillotine, antique ice tongs, and even a laser beam of some kind - are all très amusant, by far the most memorable scene features London-born starlet June Cunningham playing Bancroft's blonde bombshell mistress, Joan, dancing provocatively to a bar room jukebox and having just about as much fun as a girl can have without taking her clothes off: click here.

Cunningham may not have been the most talented actress or the most beautiful, but in this red-hot scene she cha-cha-chas her way into cinematic immortality ... 

Notes

[1] See David Pirie, A Heritage of Horror: The English Gothic Cinema, (1973). A revised edition was published in 2008 as A New Heritage of Horror (I. B. Taurus).

The two other Anglo-Amalgamated films identified by Pirie as Sadean in nature are Circus of Horrors (dir. Sidney Hayers, 1960) and Peeping Tom (dir. Michael Powell, 1960).

 [2] The episode to which I refer is, of course, 'The Cybernauts', from Series 4, (Oct. 1965).

As noted on TV Tropes, the evil cripple is a morally and physically compromised figure, though often possessing a genius intellect. The linking of disability, or physical deformity, with a predisposition towards madness, criminality, or vice, is, of course, an ancient device that regrettably reinforces negative cultural stereotypes.


To watch the original theatrical trailer for Horrors of the Black Museum (1959), click here.