William Hopper Week 3/4

Note: This is the third of four tributes to William Hopper who played Paul Drake, Perry Mason’s private detective on the classic series. After he was discharged from the Navy in 1943, William Hopper, his brown hair turned white due to meritorious service in a combat zone, was also a heavy smoker. He sold cars for nine years. It seems strange that although he went through underwater demolition and maritime sabotage, he was prone to stage fright and had little confidence to return to acting. From the early Fifties, he landed parts in B-movies and did some TV. In 1955, he played the father of Natalie Wood’s character in Rebel without a Cause. 

The Deadly Mantis
1957 / 1:19
Tagline: “Engulfing the World in Terror!”
[internet archive]

The Pentagon is growing concerned about disappearances and crashes involving Air Force personnel at a remote defense post in the Arctic. A five-foot appendage like a hook is found at a ruined facility but biologistic experts can't identify it.

Naturalist Ned Jackson (William Hopper) is called in by Maj. Gen. Mark Ford (Donald Randolph, mustached) to consult on the appendage. Ned is assisted by a comely journalist Marge Blaine (Alix Talton). Jackson theorizes that it might be from an insect like the praying mantis after Marge, with the tenacity of Lois Lane, presses him for a hypothesis.

The theory is supported soon after a deadly mantis terrorizes an Eskimo village, giving the director a chance to insert stock footage of villagers desperately paddling their kayaks away as their packs of sled dogs run somewhere. The element of surprise that a good monster reveal requires is thus taken off the table in short order.

Ned and Marge are sent to the Arctic to investigate first-hand. We movie-goers get some comic relief in the form of the sex-starved men at the remote base ogling Marge.

Hey, “some,” as in “a little.”

We also get perfunctory romance between Marge and the base commander Col. Joe Parkman (Craig Stevens). To me, the genuine comic relief is Marge throwing over Ned Jackson for Col. Joe after five minutes of interaction. Cast into a despondent funk, Ned kind of disappears and plays no role in the final disposition of the oversized bug. It just strikes me that the silver lining to our Bill Hopper being cast in this Festival of Dull is that at least they didn’t make him wear horn-rimmed glasses or have him say they had to save the creature to study it for science.

This is a singularly uninspired science fiction movie. Seeing the mantis flying between places where it wreaks mild havoc is neither interesting as a special effect nor scary. We never see the mantis eating people so the mantis is not the stuff of nightmares. We hear the roars of the mantis but instead of being chilled to the bone, we idly wonder if in fact insects have lungs with which to roar. The movie even fails to make us movie-goers feel pity for the beastie who didn’t ask to be woken up by seismic activity and was doing only what comes naturally.

I watched this movie on a Sunday afternoon when it was too hot and smokey from wild fires to do anything safely outside. A healthy person might want to watch this undemanding movie when they have just finished an especially difficult mental task. It may also be the ticket for somebody coming out of an anesthetic after an outpatient medical procedure. So even mediocre movies have their place and uses.

As for the connection with classic TV series Perry Mason, dropping the officer and gentleman parts, Donald Randolph played the smoothie perp in TCOT Cautious Coquette and the victim that had it coming in TCOT Spanish Cross. Paul Smith, who played an ogling corporal in this, had a tiny part in TCOT Jealous Journalist and a bigger part in TCOT Meddling Medium, an episode that exploited the hot topic in 1961 of ESP. Too many of the post-1960 scripts, torn from the headlines, were silly and slapdash, which Burr and Talman groused about, with little effect.