Tor Johnson was born on 19 October 1903. Or 1902. His tombstone says 1903. But tombstones are not authoritative. My grandfather’s tombstone is wrong, for example.
Johnson was a big guy. He stood three inches over six feet. He is widely reported to have weighed as much as 440 pounds. But he appeared on You Bet Your Life in 1959. And at that time, he said he was “387 pounds… soaking wet.”
He was born in Sweden. But it appears that he immigrated to the United States in 1919. At that time, he was already wrestling. By the early 1930s, he was a successful professional wrestler in Southern California. For this role, he shaved his head. He apparently had a full head of hair. This was a good idea since it allowed him to leverage his act into a decent career as a bit actor and extra. This included the role of Strongman in the Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh film Houdini.
But we remember Tor Johnson today for a handful of low-budget films in the 1950s and early-1960s. In three of these films, he played the same character, Lobo: Bride of the Monster, The Unearthly, and Night of the Ghouls. He is also remembered for his starring role in The Beast of Yucca Flats and his part as Inspector Daniel Clay in Plan 9 From Outer Space.
I assume everyone has seen Plan 9. (But revisit it! It’s always better than I remember.) So let’s watch Yucca Flats to celebrate the life of Tor Johnson. It’s a surprisingly good film. A lot of it seems more like an art than exploitation. Of course, we don’t get to hear Tor speak. The entire film was shot MOS with some dubbing and voice-over. But it works!
Tor Johnson via Wikipedia. It is in the public domain.
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Makes me think of Kola Kwariani, a professional wrestler who was in Kubrick’s “The Killing.” Check this out, just for the chess magazine cover with Kwariani and Kubrick on it! (Kwariani was a chess nerd): https://librarydvdlove.substack.com/p/the-killing
Kubrick was a big chess player. He used it to intimidate George C Scott on the set of Dr Strangelove. It’s one of many examples of Kubrick being a dick.
What I like about Johnson is that, by all accounts, he was a sweet and gentle man. If you haven’t done so, watch the You Bet Your Life clip. I’m not sure if he was actually this concrete in his thinking or if it was just an act. But it’s adorable!
I watched some, and Groucho was kinda mean, I didn’t care for that. (It might have been a bit planned backstage, though.)
Kubrick treating Scott like crap! I didn’t know that. What a jerk. And being a jerk about chess is so annoying. Games should be fun. And the thing is, Kubrick really wasn’t All That as a director, even in The Killing (which is probably his tightest film); Maltese Falcon and Sierra Madre kick its ass. He was good, but he was no f***ing genius. Plus he couldn’t write worth a damn, and didn’t respect the writers he worked with. Boo.
Glad to hear Johnson was a nice guy, though! I’ve met some really big guys who were total sweethearts. Who were made fun of for being big, and so they stood up for people made fun of for being small. A pretty laudable attitude!
Oh! That’s another one. Kubrick was a total ass to novelist Jim Thompson. And he screwed him out of a lot of money — which Thompson badly needed. But we should give him a pass. Kubrick had his head so far up his ass he couldn’t see all the harm he did to others.
But you raise an important question: How did Kubrick become such a big deal? He was a very good director. But I don’t know why people make out like he was some kind of genius.
I read about that with Thompson. Kubrick tried doing it to Dalton Trumbo on Spartacus, too — Kirk Douglas told him to shove it up his keister. Said Douglas, “All this proves that you don’t have to be a nice person to be extremely talented. You can be a s**t and be talented and, conversely, you can be the nicest guy in the world and not have any talent. Stanley Kubrick is a talented s**t.”
On why he has such a rep — I think it’s because his visual style is so obviously “stylish.” A 15-year-old can see it’s different (I did). Which can be a good thing, it turns casual viewers into critical viewers, paying more attention to things like camera angles and image framing. A 15-year-old won’t get Renoir or de Sica.
And Kubrick’s movies have a certain nihilism in them that can seem more “serious” than, say, Hollywood message movies. But that’s an awfully low bar to hurdle — to be better than dumb dreck. A lot of stuff is better than dumb dreck.
I’m glad he pissed off Kirk Douglas, though! Douglas, soon after Spartacus, got the rights to Cuckoo’s Nest — can you imagine what a TERRIBLE Kubrick movie that might have been? The horror! The horror!
Kubrick directing Cuckoo’s Nest?! If you look at his work, you can see the problem. He was terrible rendering stories about real people. I think this was the problem with Eyes Wide Shut. At the end of that film, I had only two thoughts. Who did the production design?! And how was Harvey Keitel so terrible given Sydney Pollack’s performance. (Pollack was an excellent director but a pedestrian actor.)
What I like to do is ask people who love particular directors what it is they love so much. And they rarely have much to say. Ultimately, it’s about the finished product. And filmmaking is mostly just an endless stream of solutions to minor problems. I think that’s what made Orson Welles great. It wasn’t “low angle shots” or “deep focus.” And note that he never made a fetish of this. And that’s true of most great directors. But sure, tell me again how artistic axial cuts are! In fact, has anyone seriously engaged with the fact that 2001: A Space Odyssey is actually pretty boring? I just looked it up on Rotten Tomatoes and found this from Pauline Kael, “It’s a bad, bad sign when a movie director begins to think of himself a myth-maker, and this limp myth of a grand plan that justifies slaughter and ends with resurrection has been around before.”
Far be it from me to disagree with Ms. Kael! I’ve got all her books on my small bookshelf, so read and re-read that the pages of the paperbacks are falling out. If I have any skill as a writer — and I think I’m a solid B/B minus writer — it’s from reading Kael. College courses teach you NOTHING about how to write. Kael does. Structure your sentences and paragraphs. Have them get to a point. She’s just the best.
And, if there were an afterlife, I’d meet her and she’d say “you are such an idiot about movies! You’re wrong on everything!” Because that was Pauline Kael.
“Pollack was an excellent director.” I really do kinda like “Out Of Africa.” I know it’s colonialist as hell. But the big surging John Barry score works, for me — it works in those fuqing Bond movies, too, he was good at coming up with Big Movie Music. Half my brain says “this is trash.” But the other half says “you really do like Big Movie Music, admit it.” And of course I do. When it’s not f***ing Max Steiner. He was the worst!
I tend to think of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and Three Days of the Condor. What I most remember about Out of Africa is the Mozart Clarinet Concerto.
Poor Max Steiner! You never miss an opportunity to dump on the poor man! I think he’s fine — more in your face than I’d like — but fine. The thing about movie music to me is that it is binary. It has to be good enough — fit for purpose. It’s rare that I want to listen to it alone. Howard Shore is one exception there. I love how he layers sound. Steiner always makes me think of the credits to Casablanca where he uses “La Marseillaise” just as his name is put on screen. Like Moses, he said it himself: he was the most humble of men! (No, he didn’t. But I’m sure if you got him alone he would tell you that!)
Well, if you wrote the treacly dogsh*t music to “Gone With the Wind,” you deserve some dumping. Although I don’t suppose his ghost minds TOO much. Maybe Steiner’s in Heaven now, chuckling, “if you thought my scores were bad, wait until you hear the AI slop that’s coming next…”
Most movie scores are pretty bad. Shore is good, especially with Cronenberg. Williams has his moments — the second half of Jaws is about as great as movie music gets. Leone without Morricone is unthinkable. Bernard Herrmann for North by Northwest. I’m sure you have your own favorites, I’ll stop listing mine!
But our favorites stick in our heads because most movie music is tepid-to-awful. So it is kinda unfair to slag on Max Steiner — he’s no worse than the general pool. That Casablanca bit of ego credit music is pretty wild, though! I hadn’t noticed that!
The first time I noticed the Casablanca thing, I thought, “Is that normal?!” Now I know: it isn’t normal but it is definitely not unusual!
Movie music is functional — especially in horror. And I think that’s fine. I wish I could go back to the time when I didn’t notice the music. Or anything. When a film was just a thing that works for me as a whole. I always wanted to avoid being where I am now. I was watching a Hammer Dracula film recently and I noticed something and thought, “What a great camera move!” And then I felt terrible. We aren’t supposed to watch films that way! But most days, I watch 1-2 movies. How do you (we) avoid seeing films like this? I wish there were a way!
I think I understand that. To get back to watching movies the way you did when you first started enjoying them — the actors, the plots. But it is probably somewhat impossible. Like if you’re a musician who’s played bass guitar, you’re always going to hear how a song uses bass guitar.
But that’s not altogether bad! Once you learn about the musicians in Motown, it makes more fun to re-hear the songs, and pick out “ooh, James Jamerson is doing a neat riff here.” You can watch a Coen brothers movie and go, “ooh, Roger Deakins rules” (or Carter Burwell’s music — another of my favorites). I don’t mind it. And I think it helps us get over the idea that directors are mega-geniuses, when we appreciate what the other artists bring to a film.
For me, the toughest thing is learning how rottenly the studios used & discarded people, as you mention — but I’ve always basically known that, alas. It doesn’t make learning of more examples more pleasant, though!
When I comes to studios discarding people, I’ve developed a sixth sense about it. In most cases, I can predict it based on a name. It happened so much. It is terrible and I feel bad every time. That’s something that doesn’t change!
Even if we want to go back to a time when we watched things more simply, we can’t. So I just accept it. But I think I still manage to focus on story. I think the biggest thing is that I’m more likely to appreciate something technical — that I’ll like something that in the past I wouldn’t have noticed. And that’s probably a good thing. But there’s no doubt that something is lost. (And gained, as Joni Mitchell taught us.)
Great Mitchell quote — it’s one of my favorite, ever, songs! God, she’s great.
You do lose something with more awareness of how it’s done, but I suspect it’s like knowing more of how magic acts are done (something I have no skill at). You’re not a kid anymore, wowed and astounded, but you’re still wowed and astounded in a different way, and that’s not the worst thing in the world.
That’s true. It’s a different kind of appreciation. I suspect my problem with it is the idea that critics can speak for the audience. And that just isn’t true. Regardless, there’s nothing that can be done about it…