The Bat

A movie that's suitable for Halloween although, as of the time I wrote of this post wasn't yet mentioned on the TCM schedule for October, is the Vincent Price movie The Bat. But since it was on my DVR about to expire, I made a point of watching it to be able to write up this post. And, sure enough, it wound up as part of the schedule since it is after all Halloween and this is a Vincent Price film. The Bat is showing early on Halloween at 5:30 AM.

Vincent Price plays Dr. Wells, the town doctor in one of those Hollywood small towns that's small enough to apparently have only one doctor and be close enough for people to get away to secluded cabins. Getting away is local bank (there only seems to be one bank in town) president John Fleming, who confesses to Dr. Wells that he's embezzled $1M in securities from the bank and would give up half of that to Wells in exchange for Wells helping him fake his death. Dr. Wells responds by killing Fleming, thereby saving his own life, but having the problem of being on the hook for a killing in an era where there's still a production code.

Meanwhile, back in town, Cornelia Van Gorder (Agnes Moorehead) has come to visit in order to get away from it all and work on her next book. To do that, she's rented a house owned by Fleming, not realizing or caring that the house has a history. After all, Cornelia isn't a local, so why should she believe any of the stories about what might or might not have gone on in the house? That, or the idea that there's a killer on the loose called The Bat, who has an ability to get into places humans can't? Of course, all of the servants in the house believe in it, and don't want to work in the house.

And, wouldn't you know it, but Cornelia and her secretary Lizzie actually see the hand of The Bat, before seeing an actual bat that bites Lizzie and starts flying around the house before the two women are able to trap it in a closet. The police come out, and then discover that Dr. Wells is doing scientific research that involves experimenting on bats. This last bit, combined with the fact that we already know Wells is going to have to face the Production Code, makes Wells one of the prime suspects for being The Bat.

And there's also the issue of the embezzled securities, which ties into the rest of what's going on in the movie. The viewers of course know that the deceased Fleming, who is still assumed to be off in the mountains getting away from it all, is responsible, but nobody else knows, so there are all sorts of suspects. The learn from the deceased Fleming's nephew that the house Cordelia is renting is one of those Hollywood houses that has secret hiding places, so perhaps the securities might be somewhere in the house. So all of the main characters wind up at the house, at which point the identity of The Bat is revealed and the innocent people get to have a reasonably good ending for them. The wicked, of course, get punished.

The fact that there was still a Production Code in force makes The Bat a bit of a mess. But thanks to the presence of Vincent Price and Agnes Moorehead, the film is raised above the level of schlock to something that is at least reasonably worth watching. It's not a great movie by any means, but it will certainly entertain you.

Well, the character is named William Bonney

It wasn't uncommon back in the Hollywood studio era for studios to produce biopics that were ostensibly about a famous subject, but barely reflected reality. Recently, I watched another film that fit that description: the 1941 version of Billy the Kid.

Robert Taylor plays Billy Bonney, aka Billy the Kid, and as the movie opens he's climbing into the living quarters above a jail in what is probably Lincoln County, NM (although the location backgrounds are very obviously Monument Valley in Utah) where he overpowers a sheriff's deputy and frees his friend Pedro (Frank Puglia), whose main purpose in this story is to provide some musical background and then be a key plot point later in the movie. Billy takes Pedro to a saloon run by cattle baron Dan Hickey (Gene Lockhart). Hickey makes his money selling cattle to the US government, who need the cattle to feed their soldiers.

But it's a bit of a ruse, as what Hickey and his men really do is cause competing ranchers' cattle to stampede, which means that Hickey's cattle would be the only ones left to sell to the government. Unfortunately, this time, the stampede kills one of the opposing farmers, which is a big problem. Meanwhile, one of the men affected by the stampede is Jim Sherwood (Brian Donlevy), who knew Billy when the two of them were kids.

Jim is working for one of the competing ranchers, Eric Keating (Ian Hunter), so Jim brings Billy and Pedro to the Keating ranch with the possibility of jobs. This is the depiction of the Lincoln County War, which has been depicted by Hollywood several times, notably in Chisum and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, although it's even more fictionalized here than in other movies. Keating has a sister Edith, and Billy falls in love with her, not that they're romantically suited for each other. And there's also the issue that people are still getting shot. The sheriff, McAndrews, has been working for Hickey, so Keating decides that he's going to go see the territorial governor (which would be Lew Wallace of Ben-Hur fame although he's not a character in this movie) with the aim of being deputized into law enforcement.

Keating, however, gets waylaid and ever returns to his ranch, leading Sherwood to go and get deputized himself; he's the Pat Garrett character even though the names have changed. Billy, here on the side of Keating's men, decides to go into town to get Hickey and the men Hickey sent to kill Keating, but Hickey is no dummy and sends the actual killers away so that they can't be found. Now, we know that the real life Billy the Kid was killed at the tender age of 22, so the question remains of how this movie version of Billy is going to get it in the end.

One of the reviews of Billy the Kid that I read made the argument that this is a generic Hollywood western, except that MGM decided to attach the name of Billy the Kid to is, which causes all sorts of problems considering the liberties that they had to tak with what's known about the real Billy Bonney's life. If it had been about totally fictitious people, the movie might be better. But what we actually get is a bunch of nonsense that probably looked nice on screen back in 1941 since it's in Technicolor. But even then, the print that TCM ran isn't all that good, so we don't even rally get the benefit of Technicolor.

Neither Charles Laughton nor Richard Widmark

When I was a teenager I was able to see the 1987 film No Way Out, I think courtesy of my late uncle who ran one of the local movie theaters. I learned fairly early on that it was a remake (or, based on the same source material) as The Big Clock. It was quite a bit later that I learned about the 1950 movie also titled No Way Out which has a completely different story. Anyhow, I finally watched my recording of when TCM ran the 1987 No Way Out, which is the first time in many years that I'd seen it.

The movie opens by setting up Yet Another Flashback. Lt. Cmdr. Tom Farrell (Kevin Costner) is being interrogated by a couple of military intelligence guys about his relationship with the Secretary of Defense, David Brice (Gene Hackman). Flash back to six months earlier -- we know it's six months because the film puts this right up on screen. Farrell went to school with Brice's chief of staff, Scott Pritchard (Will Patton), who invites Farrell to a party where Pritchard introduces Farrell and Brice. Also at the party is Susan Atwell (Sean Young), and somehow, the two of them wind up in a limousine together on the way back to Susan's apartment and immediately begin a one-night stand.

Farrell has to ship out to the Philippines, but he gets recalled to Washington because the Secretary of Defense wants him as his liaison between the Department of Defense and the CIA: presumably, being a friend of the Secretary's chief of staff is a good enough character reference. Getting to go back to Washington also means that he's going to be able to see Susan again. They resume their relationship, with Susan even taking a fateful Polaroid of Farrell.

What Farrell doesn't know is that Susan is also having a relationship with... Secretary of Defense Brice! This is obviously a problem for all three of them, and causes what is at first an awkward situation when Brice knocks on Susan's door while she and Farrell are having a tryst. Things get much worse when Brice and Susan get in an argument where Brice accidentally knocks Susan over a railing, sending her falling to her death. It should be manslaughter, but even manslaughter is a serious problem for a Secretary of Defense.

So how to frame somebody else? Well, there are two lines of attack here. One is that Polaroid, which didn't actually develop well, leading to a blurry image. Allegedly even primitive computer technology of the 1980s can clean up stuff like this, so that we'll find out who Susan's other lover is. Now, Farrell is no dummy, and he begins to cotton on to the fact that he's going to be implicated in Susan's killing even though he's quite innocent. This again being the 80s, there's also the Cold War going on, which offers the Secretary of Defense a convenient way of throwing the dead Susan under the bus by intimating that the other lover was actually a well-known Soviet agent named Yuri. The CIA is investigating, and this being a pre-Trump movie the intelligence services are portrayed as being dishonest and more than willing to go around the law to get what they want.

No Way Out is a well-made movie, and it's easy to see why it was a box-office hit. For me there was an issue with the ending. I also had the feeling, watching it a second time, that it's a bit more rooted in the 1980s than The Big Clock was rooted in its era. It's a minor quibble, however, and No Way Out is definitely still entertaining almost 40 years on.

Der amerikanische Freund

Another of the foreign films that was sitting on my DVR about to expire that I had to make a point of getting around to before that expiration was Wim Wenders' The American Friend.

The movie is based on Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley (played here by Dennis Hopper) character, as Wenders was apparently a big fan of Highsmith but couldn't get the rights to the particular Highsmith book he wanted to adapt. Ripley here is an underworld gangster shuttling between New York and Hamburg. In New York he commissions art from Derwatt (director Nicholas Ray), who has faked his own death because this raises the price of his art at auction; the auction is held in Hamburg. At the auction in Hamburg, Ripley meets Jonathan Zimmermann (Bruno Ganz), a gallery worker who frames artwork, but the two don't get along.

Ripley has his life, and gets approached by Raoul (Gérard Blain), a French gangster, as part of a murder for hire plot in the Paris Métro. Jonathan has his life, which isn't much, considering that he's been diagnosed with a blood disease that may or may not be terminal. And he's got a wife Marianne (Lisa Kreuzer) and young son to look after. Ripley isn't exactly pleased with the idea of killing this guy in Paris, but he has an idea which is to rope Zimmermann into killing the guy in Paris.

Raoul is no dummy, so he comes up with a good idea of his own to get Zimmermann to agree to do the murder. This is to take Jonathan to Paris for a second medical opinion, only to have the test results faked so that Zimmermann will believe he has a very short amount of time to live. So it won't really matter if he gets found out in the murder; he'll be dead soon anyway. That, and the money could leave his wife and kid financially secure.

Zimmermann is actually good at luring the guy to his death, but things get more complicated because Ripley and Zimmermann begin to form a friendship. So when Raoul wants to use Zimmermann to help commit another murder, Ripley is horrified. And he's right to be horrified, since this killing is going to set off a gang war that will leave Ripley in danger, but even more so the much less guilty Zimmermann who, after all, has been roped into something not of his own making.

The American Friend is a Wim Wenders film, which means that it runs at a leisurely pace and is more about the characters than the story. This may not be to everybody's taste. And, I have to be honest, I think I prefer some of the other Wenders films I've seen to The American Friend precisely because this one needs to be more story-focused. Hopper and Ganz both do a good job with their roles, and the film is visually interesting for its look at the late 1970s. But I think it could have been a better film.

Once again, for some values of "loved"

I'm always interested in early talkies, even if they turn out not to be so good. The way at which America looked at itself and some of the cultural norms that are different from today, close to a century on, are sometimes quite interesting. An example of this that really isn't a very good film is Three Who Loved.

One of the three is John Hanson (Conrad Nagel), presumably a Swedish immigrant although he's lost his accent and is working as a New York bank teller in an era when this was considered a highly respectable occupation. He works with his best friend Phil Wilson (Robert Ames), and both of them live in a rooming house run by fellow Swedish immigrant Anna Larson (Bodil Rosing). Anna is the aunt of Helga (Betty Compson), who happens to be the longtime girlfriend of John, or at least was back when he was still in Sweden as comment is made that John hasn't seen Helga in ten years.

But Helga is coming over to America to live, with John planning to marry her. In addition, in order to improve his life, John has been studying law at night and is hoping to take the bar exam as he's got a law firm already willing to take him on once he passes the bar exam and is admitted to the bar. Helga likes John and Anna does too, so there's the chance for them all to live happily ever after.

Yeah, right, since we're only about 15 minutes into the movie. John is supposed to be a good guy, but he's so busy tring to improve his life so that he can provide better for Helga that he doesn't have enough time for her. And he can't even bother to get engaged to her the day she steps off the boat. Phil, on the other hand, has no compunctions about putting the moves on Helga although it starts off innocently enough when John suggests Phil show Helga a bit of New York and John can take her out the following night. Helga falls in love with Phil, although he's not as much in love with her as she is with him. Anna can see the former and warns John, but even she can't see the latter.

And then the characters start to make really stupid decisions. The movie starts off in the mid-1920s, when the economy is going great guns. And John spends money he doesn't have -- an idiotic lack of probity for a banker -- first by buying stocks on margin and then putting $7500 down as the "first payment" for a house, a ridiculous sum for 1926. (IIRC, the house I grew up in was a 1974 new-build that cost maybe $50K in inflated money.) When John's stock tout shows up saying John needs to back his stock or lose his entire investment, what does John do but embezzle $10K from Phil's till. (What were bank tellers doing with this much cash on hand?) Phil is absent because he's just about to walk out on Helga after telling her he's going to get a marriage license.

Needless to say, the bank examiners show up and find Phil $10K short and about to leave for South America, so he is to them and the police obviously guilty. And John won't admit guilt because he knows Phil was about to walk out on her anyway and can't leave Helga high and dry. So John lets Phil be wrongly convicted and marries Helga, fathering a son (a very young Dickie Moore) by her.

Five years pass and Helga is trapped in a loveless marriage, at least from her point of view, because she's still busy pining after Phil not realizing he was going to jilt her. John sees Helga treating him and the kid not so well by constantly partying with her friends, while Phil is in prison vowing revenge against whoever sent him up, not realizing that the person in question is in fact John. And then Phil escapes and goes to Helga and John's house for help....

As you can tell from the synopsis, Three Who Loved is certainly interesting, although the plot becomes a complete mess in the second half. That, and it was produced by RKO, who at this early stage seemed to be making movies competently, if cheaply with the result being things that provided product for the exhibitors without being terribly memorable. The three main characters all need to be taken by the neck and shaken to get some sense into them. And poor Betty Compson has to put on that accent. Three Who Loved is definitely worth watching as a product of its time, even if it's not very good.

Dr. Cyclops

Horror movies tend to get overlooked at Oscar time, I think, with the exception of the effects awards. An example of a film that TCM was in fact able to show during 31 Days of Oscar because it got a Visual Effects nomination is Dr. Cyclops.

As we saw a few months back when I reviewed The Invisible Ray, radium was considered something of a great hope in terms of its potential medical uses, despite the radiation also being extremely dangerous. The ore was often found in exotic out of the way locations which, in the case of Dr. Cyclops means the Amazon jungle of Peru. Dr. Thorkel (Albert Dekker) is working on the good use of radium together with Dr. Mendoza (Paul Fix). But, Thorkel is beginning to lose his eyesight along with going mad, the latter of which Mendoza is noticing. So Thorkel kills Mendoza, and writes to America to get research help.

The American institute sends Dr. Mary Robinson (Janice Logan) and Dr. Rupert Bulfinch (Charles Halton). They suspect there might be some sort of major discovery, so they engage Bill Stockton (Thomas Coley), a mineralogist who can't really refuse the offer because of the debts he's racked up. Getting overland to Thorkel's jungle research station is going to be difficult, and the pack animal owner Steve Baker (Victor Killian) is only going to rent the animals if he's able to go along. Rounding out the cast is Thorkel's servant Pedro (Frank Yaconelli).

The group gets to Dr. Thorkel's station, only to learn that all he wanted was for Bulfinch or Robinson to look at a couple of slides because of Thorkel's declining eyesight. This, along with other things such as bones that might be the harbinger of a new species, pique the group's curiosity, which is heightened when Bill determines this is the motherlode for some of the best pitchblende (the ore of radium and uranium) out there. And, Thorkel has learned how to harness it much more precisely than anybody before him.

Except there's the issue of how he's planning to use those radium rays. Thorkel has been experimenting on reducing the size of man in order to decrease man's environmental impact. But anybody figuring this out is going to be a danger to Thorkel's insane plans. And now this group of interlopers from America has come and seen those plans! So Thorkel locks them in the radiation chamber and shrinks them down to size, with the plan to kill them after subjecting them to suitable horrors since the group knows what's going to come and Thorkel is Bond-villianous in the way he reveals his plans. He could step on them, or let the cat kill them the way it kills mice.

Of course, the group isn't about to let any of this happen, and try to figure out a way to fight back. They being human, they really are the most dangerous game. Also, being miniature, it's a good excuse for the movie to engage in creative special effects, leading up to the climax.

Dr. Cyclops is another of those movies where they splurged on special effects, and Technicolor, to the point that the screenplay suffers. This isn't the most original plot by any means, and the cast shows that having the best actors in it wasn't that terribly important. Still, because of the effects, even a recycled plot works well enough to entertain. Only the effects that involve the players against rear-projection photography don't work so well, since the backgrounds look grainy from being so blown up. That's a minor objection. Dr. Cyclops, while not being great, succeeds at what it sets out to do.

He chews to talk

I knew I was going to have a post on a short going up today since I was planning to do that in conjunction with mentioning the Eva Marie Saint tribute. With that in mind, I pulled out my Will Rogers box set since when I watched Mr. Skitch I saw that there was a short on it. In fact, all four of the discs include one featurette. One is a standard 15-minute or so bio type piece, so no need to review that here. A second is Jane Withers remembering Rogers, which is a bit odd considering that the two of them never appeared in a movie together, at least not according to IMDb. Withers had been in several films by the time Rogers died. A third is a real short, which I'll post about some other time. Finally, there's one that the DVD case calls He Chews to Talk.

Having watched it, I'm not 100% sure of the provenance of this one. There's no opening title beyond a brief newsreel-type card of Rogers speaking on the radio. And that's about all this is, with Rogers delivering a monologue of about nine minutes starting with a take-off of ads of the day, before talking about the Depression. Now, considering some of the comments Rogers makes, this seems pretty likely to date to 1931, since he mentions Republicans delivering three bad years and then one good year at election time, with the Democrats being the other way around. Also, most of the commentary is the populist sort that you might have heard from blue-collar labor union types: there's enough wealth to go around, but also not 100% thrilled with Democrats.

As for the title, apparently Rogers wrote a series of "campaign" articles for Life magazine which got the title "He chews to run", which fits with the sort of homespun corn-pone humor you'd expect from Rogers. That and the fact that Rogers was well known for chewing gum. So it seems a bit obvious that somehere along the way this might have gotten a note of "He chews to talk" or something like that internally at Fox. However, IMDb doesn't list any Rogers short by that title and searching for it on the web only yields collections of his writings or this particular short on YouTube, which is probably the same print that appears on the DVD.

However: One of the copies on YouTube was put up by The Will Rogers Museum, calling it "Bacon, Beans, and Limousines", which doesn't seem to be an official title either, although they date it to October 1931.

TCM's Eva Marie Saint tribute

Eva Marie Saint in the scene that I think of as winning her the Oscar in On the Waterfront (Oct. 25, 8:00 PM)

Oscar-winning actress Eva Marie Saint died on October 6 at the age of 102. I mentioned when I posted about her death that I figured the TCM schedule for October was such that they probably wouldn't be able to get around to a proper tribute until November, but I was wrong. Saint didn't make a whole lot of movies, and TCM will be showing five of her best-known roles starting tomorrow afternoon:

12:00 PM Raintree County, which is really an Elizabeth Taylor movie;
3:00 PM All Fall Down, with Saint again playing more of a supporting role with a young Warren Beatty starring;
5:00 PM 36 Hours, an underrated suspense movie about Nazi Rod Taylor trying to extract information from James Garner, helped by Saint;
7:00 PM Eva Marie Saint: Live from the TCM Classic Film Festival, an interview she did with Robert Osborne at the 2013 TCM Classic Film Festival;
8:00 PM On the Waterfront, with Saint playing the woman whose brother was murdered by corrupt union thugs;
10:00 PM North By Northwest, in which Saint helps Cary Grant foil a ring of spies, with him not knowing she's actually working for the government.

Note that the TCM Film Festival interview is listed as running 59 minutes and is in a one-hour time slot. I don't know if anybody will be introducing the film, although since this a Sunday afternoon there normally is someone presenting the movies on Saturday and Sunday afternoons.

Note also that the schedule as it leaves time for the normal Silent Sunday Nights and TCM Imports selections.

Wee Willie Winkie

There aren't all that many movies airing in the FXM Retro block that I haven't blogged about before, mostly because I've been blogging for closing in on 19 years. One that hasn't gotten a post yet and is on my DVR is Wee Willie Winkie. Since it's getting another airing tomorrow, October 24, at 6:00 AM, I figure that now is a good time to watch it and put up the obligatory post on it.

In frontier India in 1897, Joyce Williams (June Lang) is an American widow with young daughter Priscilla (Shirley Temple). Apparently her late husband's father is an Englishman, serving with the British Army in India, and Joyce must not have any American relatives. Otherwise there would be no reason for Joyce and Priscilla to go all the way to India. Already on the train, we see that Priscilla can be rather annoying as she asks all sorts of obnoxious questions. As the train gets to the station in Raj Pore, Priscilla witnesses the arrest of Khoda Khan (Cesar Romero), a rebel leader who has been attacking the British.

Mother and daughter get to the army base just as Grandpa, Col. Williams (C. Aubrey Smith) is disciplining Lt. Brandes (Michael Whalen), the sort of young dashing officer who would be just right for Joyce; indeed, that's going to be one of the subplots of the movie as Brandes also likes little Priscilla. Meanwhile, there are other women on base who are trying to set up their adult daughter with Brandes, although that's more comic relief and a minor subplot. Priscilla continues to be naïvely mischievous, in the sense that she should be smart enough to know not to do the things she's doing but is either too young or too stupid. For this, she gets taken under the wing of Sgt. MacDuff (Victor McLaglen), who makes her a mascot of sorts for his platoon as well as a bit of a soldier. Not that a kid of Priscilla's age is actually going to do any real soldiering. Certainly not when that kid is Shirley Temple.

One of the stupid things Priscilla does is to give Khoda a religious pendant he lost when he was getting arrested that she picked up. Later, the colonel's manservant Mohammet Dihn gives Priscilla a "prayer" message to take to Khoda, who is being held in the garrison jail where the army is stationed. This is actually a message from Khoda's fellow rebels beyond the border about how they're going to spring him from the jail. Worse, in the ensuing attack, Sgt. MacDuff gets seriously injured.

Priscilla is too young to understand everything that's going on, and as far as she knows Khoda is a decent enough fellow. She figures that if she could just talk to Khoda she could get everybody to see reason and come to a peaceful settlement. So she gets Mohammet Dihn to take her to Khoda's headquarters through the well-defended pass that's a chokepoint such that if the British try to go through, they'll get slaughtered. Khoda thinks he's got a wonderful bargaining chip in the garrison commander's daughter, but then again, he's also got Shirley Temple and you know how a Shirley Temple movie is going to end....

Shirley Temple is appealing enough in Wee Willie Winkie. Certainly, I can see how audiences in the 1930s would have loved her in a movie like this. However, I find the plot here a bit weak and taking a bit too long to get to the real action. Also, Shirley Temple is being asked to be even more naïve than you'd expect a child to be. So this one wasn't quite as good in my view as some of Shirley's other movies. But it's still worth watching.

From Beyond the Grave

The second half of tonight's lineup on TCM, after midnight, includes several horror anthology movies. One that I hadn't seen before, but was sitting on my DVR from the last time it aired, is From Beyond the Grave, which comes on overnight at 2:00 AM.

The establishing story, or what connects everything together, is an antique shop in London run by an unnamed proprietor, played by Peter Cushing. Each of the stories is started by a different person coming into the shop looking to buy an item; whether the person has a positive or negative outcome in the story depends in part upon how honest they are.

First is Edward Charlton (David Warner), who buys an old mirror for his apartment. When he has some guests over, one of them comment about the mirror looking like it could have been in an old-timey ghost story. So the group decides to host a séance, not that anybody really believes in that stuff. Of course, this time it turns out that the other side is actually real, in the sense that there's a ghost in the mirror. And it decides to possess poor Edward, telling Edward that he needs to kill people in order to satisfy the ghost with the dead people's blood. But will the ghost ever be satisfied? And won't somebody figure out that Edward is killing people?

Next up is Christopher (Ian Bannen). He hasn't got much of a life. Since getting demobbed from the military, he's wound up in a loveless marriage to Mabel (Diana Dors) with a son Stephen and a low-paying, low-status job as an office manager. One day on the way to the office, he meets Jim (Donald Pleasance), an older man who sells matches and the like. Jim is pushy enough that Christopher should see warning sirens, but instead he pilfers a military medal from the antiques shop, feeling the need to go over to Jim's apartment and visit. Meanwhile, Mabel has weird feelings that there's somebody else in the room trying to stab her or something.

Reggie (Ian Carmichael) is a businessman with a wife Susan (Nyree Dawn Porter) who cheats the proprietor out of a snuff box before heading home to Sussex. On the train to Sussex, he shares a compartment with Madame Orloff (Margaret Leighton), who claims to be a clairvoyant and claims that Reggie has some kind of being on his shoulder that's all sorts of bad juju and that's trying to escape into the real world. Once again, no reason to believe any of this crap, at least not until Susan first tells Reggie there's a sudden bad smell followed by Susan realizing someone -- or something -- is trying to kill her.

Finally, William Seaton (Ian Ogilvy) sees an antique door he likes, even if he's only going to use it to replace the door to his stationery closet. His wife Rosemary (Lesley-Anne Down) jokes about using such a door for a terribly mundane purpose, but surprise surprise, installing this door opens a portal so a world from several centuries earlier inhabited by a magician only William can see, and not every time he opens the door. At least, not until the magician decides he wants Rosemary....

From Beyond the Grave is more than competent for the genre of horror anthologies. It's not great, certainly not as good as something like Dead of Night, but it's certainly good enough to entertain. And as always with anthologies, the stories are short enough that if you don't like one, you don't have to wait all that long for the next story.