Tonight's movie watch was a very unusual, highly memorable film, yet whose very existence I only learned about a few days earlier – but whose premise intrigued me so much that I duly purchased the DVD, which arrived this morning. A dark movie about movies, not to mention mayhem and madness, it is entitled Fade To Black.
Directed and also written by Vernon Zimmerman, Fade To Black was released in 1980 by Compass International and American Cinema Releasing, and focuses upon a film buff who takes films just a little too seriously…
Eric Binford (played by Dennis Christopher) is a geeky, shy, not unlikeable, but lowly, underachieving young worker at a film distributor's warehouse in Los Angeles. Workmates pick on him, his aggressive boss Marty Berger (Norman Burton) is forever berating him, so too is his wheelchair-bound Aunt Stella (Eve Brent Ashe) with whom he has lived all his life since his mother's death, and he has neither any friends nor any discernible future beyond his downbeat job.
However, all of these grievances are compensated for by Eric's passionate, life-long love of the movies, finding solace and escapism by screening and watching all of his favourite stars and characters in his movie memorabilia-packed bedroom every evening after work. Moreover, he has acquired through the years an encyclopaedic knowledge of the big screen. Conversely, Eric's aunt has neither patience nor interest in any of this, considering it to be an unhealthy obsession, and telling him irascibly that it's time he started living in the real world.
One day, Eric chances upon a young model and budding actress named Marilyn (Linda Kerridge) who bears a striking resemblance to his all-time favourite movie star, the one and only Marilyn Monroe. So eventually he plucks up enough courage to ask her out on a date to their local cinema to watch a movie together. To his astonishment, she accepts, finding him rather cute, and at the appointed time he duly arrives at the cinema and waits for her outside, slickly dressed in his smartest attire. Tragically, however, Marilyn has forgotten all about poor Eric and has gone out with someone else instead. Eventually, she does remember their planned date and, feeling guilty, hails a cab and drives to the cinema, but it is too late – dejected at being rejected, Eric has gone home. And for days afterwards, he locks himself in his bedroom watching movies and chain-smoking, feeling too abject even to eat, let alone go to work.
Finally, ill-tempered Stella has had enough, wheels herself into Eric's bedroom, and savagely smashes his film projector. It just so happens that the movie that Eric had been watching was Kiss of Death (1947), in which a wheelchair-bound harridan is pushed down the stairs to her death – and the shock of seeing Stella smash his beloved projector, added to the trauma that he had already been suffering from having been (as he wrongly thought) stood up by Marilyn, proves too much. In a fit of psychotic rage, Eric duly re-enacts in real life the movie scene that he has just watched on screen, resulting in Stella lying dead in her wheelchair at the bottom of the stairs inside their house.
However, Eric deftly passes it off as a tragic accident and duly inherits not only Stella's house but also her ashes, in whose urn he takes malign delight in discarding his cigarettes – a disturbing indication of the increasingly dark, macabre pathways along which his rapidly-unraveling, movie-addled mind will be travelling as this film progresses. And sure enough, having successfully disposed of his aunt, Eric duly does the same for his other tormentors, including a hooker who had insulted him, bullying co-worker Richie (an early role for Mickey Rourke), his boss Berger, and film producer Gary Bially (Morgan Paull) who has brazenly stolen an idea for a movie that Eric had previously proposed to him.
However, such is his movie-infused madness that instead of committing straightforward murders, Eric goes to great pains to recreate key killing scenes from his favourite films. He even faithfully dresses up as the silver screen assassins in question, which include Hopalong Cassidy, Dracula, The Mummy, and gangster Cody Jarrett (from the 1949 James Cagney movie White Heat), but this ultimately leads to Eric's undoing.
For whereas his true identity is concealed beneath his grotesque early disguises, when dressed as Jarrett while shooting Bially dead in a hail of bullets Eric is readily recognized – and the chase is now well and truly on between him and a posse of police. Even so, they are pursuing him somewhat belatedly, because criminal psychologist Dr Jerry Moriarty (Tim Thomerson) had already raised Eric as a suspect after profiling him regarding the earlier murders, but his suspicions had been brusquely dismissed by Captain M.L. Gallagher (James Luisi), the hot-headed, arrogant police officer leading the investigation into those murders.
What happens next I'll leave you to discover for yourselves if you watch this very engrossing movie. Let's just say the 1957 Laurence Olivier/Marilyn Monroe movie The Prince and the Showgirl (which just so happens to be one of my own favourite films) plays a major part, as does White Heat once again ("Made it, Ma! Top of the world!").
Dennis Christopher plays Eric with exactly the correct proportions of nerdy pathos and sinister psychosis, mixing and blending these potent portions of his splitting sanity to great effect – to the extent that even though he ultimately transforms into a veritable movie monster himself, you cannot help but root for him, especially during this movie's early sections, when he does his best to fit in and be accepted by those around him, only to be consistently mocked and misused by them instead.
Now, a trio of queries. Firstly: one of the investigating cops, Officer Ann Oshenbull (Gwynne Gilford, who was pregnant with future actor Chris Pine during this movie's production!), discovers to her surprise that Eric's late aunt Stella was not his aunt at all. In fact, she was his mother, but in order to prevent losing her career as a dancer (which she was before the accident that confined her to a wheelchair when Eric was only 4 years old), Stella had publicly claimed that he was the child of her deceased sister. Yet this shocking discovery was never revealed to Eric in the movie – so why was it included in the first place? After all, by not influencing the plot or any characters in any way, it served no useful purpose, it was wholly superfluous.
Secondly: despite Dr Moriarty appearing in the movie as a major character throughout it, his scientific expertise was never drawn upon. On the contrary, it was repeatedly ridiculed and dismissed by Captain Gallagher. So, once again, why was Moriarty included at all?
Thirdly: bearing in mind that Eric was far from generously paid at his job, where on earth did he get all the money from to pay for the immense collection of highly impressive movie memorabilia that filled his bedroom and beyond at home? Even when acting out his favourite movie murders in reality, he took pains to duplicate with precision the attire worn by the actors playing those roles on screen, and the extravagant costumes and props that he used when recreating The Prince and the Showgirl would have cost a fortune! Clearly, therefore, in order to take this movie even remotely seriously (which of course we shouldn't ever try to), we need to indulge in some serious suspending of disbelief!
Such contentions aside, however, I personally found Fade To Black to be very compelling viewing, boasting a plot so unapologetically implausible that it is all the better for being so – a unique example of imaginative, surreal escapism both for its viewers and for its lead character, who inhabits his own movie within the movie that the rest of us are watching.
If you would like to visit the weird world that his all-consuming obsession with the silver screen has created inside Eric's shuttered, shattered mind, be sure to click here to view an official Fade To Black trailer on YouTube.
To view a complete chronological listing of all of my Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE, and please click HERE to view a complete fully-clickable alphabetical listing of them.
Love this film.
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