How I long to one day see a strong gust of wind whisk a terrified mime through the air and over the horizon. I think everybody agrees with Ernie Hudson’s cop in the original The Crow when he said, “That walking against the wind shit, I hate that.”
In 1974’s Shanks is the first time Marcel Marceau, the world’s most legendary mime, would star in a feature film. He doesn’t play a mime in this, though his character is a deaf-mute. That his character is a puppeteer doesn’t seem like much a stretch. I feel there is a vaguely defined category of arts which, if practiced, will cost you friends, and it includes both types of performance. It also includes ventriloquism, which would be a step too far for Marceau.
He is the sole bread earner in a household of French people somehow living in a small town in rural America. There’s his perpetually drunk brother Phillipe Clay and Clay’s wife, played by Tsilla Chelton. His employer is the area’s token wealthy mad scientist, whom our protagonist assists in lab. All three will be shown at the start of the picture as puppets in the show being staged by Marceau for some kids. I was surprised to find this scene brought to my mind a moment from Children in Paradise which, frankly, is not all that similar to this. And this movie definitely ain’t Children in Paradise.
Also watching the show is Cindy Eilbacher, a teen who seems to be a bit old to be so wrapped up in the puppetry, though I also wondered what the allure was for the younger kids. I suspect it is the same reason the allure of Punch and Judy shows will forever elude me, the idea of domestic violence as kids’ entertainment. Eilbacher and Marceau’s relationship is awfully creepy, with his apparent crush on her scanning as being rather childlike and naive, though inappropriate when coming from a grown man. That he is working on a puppet head modelled on her makes this queasiness that much worse.
His work for the eccentric scientist is no less unnerving. Also played by Marceau, only in some rather effective old age makeup, the initial experiment is that old trick of making a frog briefly burst with movement through some electric jolts. The next step is to do wirelessly, using electrodes and a remote control to seemingly bring a chicken fully back to life. We shall call this Chekhov’s Wireless Zombie Chicken.
When the inventor dies, the puppeteer gets the idea to continue the man’s work by plugging electrodes into that corpse and using the remote to make it walk around the countryside. You know, nothing pays tribute to the deceased like turning them into a literal meat puppet which you manipulate for your own amusement. I only recently learned by grandmother had requested (a request which, thankfully, was ignored) to be sitting upright in the coffin for the visitation held at the funeral home. Just imagine the horrific possibilities this technology might have introduced.
I was already curious how long Marceau’s new toy would last, given corpses do not have a long shelf life, and an interstitial text card informs us he buried his friend a few days later. These text cards recall silent film, extending the shtick of Marceau’s silence through at least three forms of media by this point. There was also concert album The Best of Marcel Marceao, which was two sides of silence followed by rapturous applause. That is more clever than anything in this film.
Fresh out of fresh corpses, our protagonist will have new puppets when his brother and sister-in-law die in incidents that occur partly because of his newfound technical expertise. One of those deaths will involve the aforementioned remote-controlled Wireless Zombie Chicken.
While I realize science is not meant to be a strong suit of this film, I did find myself speculating way too much about those remotes. Without only three knobs on them, they seem to control more individual muscles than possible, and in wide range of motion. Marceau has a weird tendency to hold the controller against his chest, which makes it appear he is playing with his nipples. As for the feasibility of these controllers, I especially refuse to believe he could control two human corpses simultaneously through one remote in each hand.
Even less believable is Eilbacher seeing people moving in such a crudely mechanical manner and not immediately realize something is wrong. She is slow to realize those two are dead and, when she does, she is shockingly quick to determine this is something exciting and fun. You know how teenage girls are—always looking to commit desecration of a corpse for entertainment purposes.
The zombified Chelton and Clay will even be the servants at the birthday party Marceau throws for her in the inventor’s mansion. Admittedly, Eilbacher finds some of this a bit unnerving, though nowhere near as much as any sane person would. Then the bikers invade the house…wait, what?!
Yep, bikers arrive and just march right into the place like they’ve been there before and lay the body of a compatriot out on the dining room table. And these aren’t bikers of the kind from Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, as the leader of this gang will take away the girl for the obvious purpose of violating her.
The first frame of the film says “Willam Castle presents a grim fairy tale” and he definitely did that in this, his final film. It starts out ugly and becomes more so as it continues, until it finally ends up in territory so dark you wouldn’t believe this is one of the director’s films. Yes, his earlier horror films also had gruesome elements, but they were so goofy that I don’t see how anybody found them scary. When you’re relying on gimmicks like joy buzzers under theater seats for jump scares, we’re talking about works closer to carnival attraction than horror cinema. And there is a certain innocent joy in that.
Compounding the bad taste this left in my mouth are the production values, which are right out of television fare of the time. The interiors all look like they’re ready for a sitcom, which makes what transpires on those sets all the more disturbing in contrast. Curiously shoddy production values result in elements like a high (and, supposedly, stone) wall upon which a climactic fight occurs wobbling as the actors move around on it.
The one positive thing I can about this film is the skills Marceau learned through mime serve him well when playing the reanimated scientist. It has to take great control to get himself into some of the positions he achieves here. His movements are so effective as to no longer see the performer behind the performance. It was the only time in the film I forgot what I was seeing and that it is not really a dead person being crudely manipulated remotely. Chelton and Clay do similarly impressive work in their turns as meat puppets, and I wondered if they, too, had a background in mime.
It is unclear whether the final images we see in Shanks are in the hero’s mind as he loses his final grasp on reality or that everything we have seen was in his imagination the entire time. Basically, it comes down to whether it takes a route that is merely pretentious or one that is pretentious and a cheat. That the final images of Marceau make him appear vaguely like Malcolm McDowell in Droog mode from A Clockwork Orange only makes our alleged hero appear terrifying, regardless of the intention. At least there is some truth to this, the acknowledgement that mimes are fundamentally creepy.
Dir: William Castle
Starring Marcel Marceau, Cindy Eilbacher, Tsilla Chelton, Philippe Clay
Watched on Olive Films blu-ray