After hours… Dementia (1955), BFI Dual Format

“I enjoyed DEMENTIA. It stirred my blood, purged my libido… The work was a work of art. Whether YOU like it or not will depend entirely upon the permeability of your emotional shell, your idioplasm and your previous conditions of servitude.”

Filmed in Venice, Los Angeles, mostly on a single night in 1953, Dementia makes up in atmosphere what it lacks in budget and is that rarest of things, a silent film made after 1929. It’s audacious and combines disjointed narrative with music and performance to project defined mental states onto screen. David Lynch would love it, Jim Jarmusch too as another fan of night-time dislocation in Mystery Train or Martin Scorsese for After Hours. Maybe even Orson Welles, whose Touch of Evil famous single-take opening was also shot on Venice’s Windward Avenue, which is where Dementia’s lead character, The Gamin, is seen running from and towards trouble.

Preston Sturges definitely was a fan and gave his friend, writer-director John Parker, carte blanch to use the quote above. Praise indeed and we must celebrate the cleansing of Preston’s libido even now even though I’m not quite sure what he meant! The film does have a feminist edge though and the usual treatment of femininity in Hollywood is subverted as violence against women is not glorified or used to titillate, it’s there as an every-present unease with The Gamin, played by Adrienne Barrett (Parker’s secretary and a decent actress in her only leading role), also capable of violence and, whilst distressed, certainly not a helpless damsel. But, as Ian Schultz says in his essay in the set’s booklet, there are “… multiple incidents (that) let the viewer know that The Gamin is living in a world where women are pursued and abused.”

The opening shot into the hotel

Dementia is a silent film with only sound effects and screams emanating from its players all set to the uncanny vocalese of Marni Nixon over avant-garde composer George Antheil’s music. Antheil had composed the score for Ballet Mécanique (1924) by experimental filmmakers Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy (with cinematography by one Man Ray) – another silent link. Antheil was also the musician who worked with Hedy Lamarr in developing theories of spread-signal radio guidance… We also have some cool jazz from the actual Shorty Rogers and his actual band, the Giants, which roots the pivotal night club sequence in the deceptive comforts of sophisticated modern improvisations as the action takes its turn to be more surreal.

Originally a ten-minute film, Parker expanded his film to an hour with help from two of his leading actors, Bruno Ve Sota who, according to Shultz was most probably the film’s director and Ben Roseman, who plays The Gamin’s abusive father and the rather strange police officer who tracks her throughout – it is a film that wears Freudian psychology on its sleeve.

The titles roll as the camera focuses on the stars over LA and then pulls down to reveal a skid row street before moving across to pull through a hotel window where sleeps a young woman known only as the Gamine. She’s restless, pulling at the bed clothes disturbed by feverish conscience perhaps and by the thought of being overwhelmed by a wave at the beach as she runs for safety.

Male menace throughout night-time Venice

She wakes and heads out into the night encountering characters from her past or present and which, taken at face value, build into a defined story of who she is and what she’s done but the air of unreality leaves enough uncertainty to keep you uncertain as almost everything that does happen is like a waking dream. She keeps on seeing newspaper headlines about a “mysterious stabbing” and doesn’t react as we expect… she’s not repulsed by violence; she may well enjoy it?

She meets Richard Barron as the Evil One – the Charley Chase of Earth 2, turned to crime rather than comedy – who appears to pimp her out to a passing Rich Man (Bruno Ve Sota), who takes her to various night clubs. The Rich Man is greasily seedy, eyeing up the dancers like so much property and as they travel in his limousine, the Gamine thinks back to her parents or rather her parents’ graves. She’s shown a graveyard by a tall ghoulish figure wearing a black mask, rather like a sinister Ghost of Christmas Past, and sees visions of her mother (Lucille Howland) and father (Ben Roseman) as the latter shoots the former and, in revenge, we see her stab him in the back. Did she or did she just want to? The fact that the Detective wears the same face may suggest either or neither.

Mum and Dad in the graveyard

So it goes as she heads to the Rich Man’s apartment where events do not quite pan out as we expect on any level and from there further into the darkness encountering strange flower sellers, drunks and Short jazzmen. Is it reality? You have to be kidding… but she definitely had too much to dream last night.

Dementia was too much for the censors and it was banned with Parker only managing to get it screened once in 1955. Jack H Harris bought the movie and it was re-worked in 1957 as Daughter of Horror – also on this BFI disc - with added narration from Johnny Carson sidekick Ed McMahon who claimed to be the ghoul in a re-shot cemetery scene, although this seems unlikely given shots of Barrett with said figure from ‘53. That sequence is best known as that featured as the movie-within-a-movie in Harris’ The Blob (1958) as the film teenagers are watching when The Blob arrives to kill them.

The vibe turns strange for Shorty and the Giants

So, you’ll want to check over your shoulder when you’re watching Dementia but you’ll probably be too engrossed in what is a remarkably stylish and engaging film. Ed Wood’s cinematographer, William C Thompson was used for the film yet his capture of Venice after hours is far beyond anything Wood brought out from him. Somehow, the stars aligned to create a work of lasting interest, cinematically oddball but sincerely strange!

Dementia is available for pre-order from the BFIonline shop right now and will be available on 19^th October, well before Halloween.