Grahame: Cracked!

One of our favorite genres here in The Underworld is the "hag horror" or "psycho biddy" (there are a wide array of terms for it) in which a once-glamorous and well-known actress is belatedly cast in a movie with terror content. Audiences seemed to lap up the chance to see once-dazzling favorites being put through their horrific paces. This trend (starting off with a bang in 1962 with What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?) held on strong for at least a decade, with star after star seeming to take her turn at bat, though there were hold-outs, to be sure. Many of these movies have been profiled here, but never this one. For a long time it was only available in horribly dull, dark, blurred copies, but we've recently enjoyed a more pristine print (not that it made the movie much better!) Filmed under the the more apt title "The Blood Secret," (for a total budget of $200K!!), it saw the light of day, mostly at drive-ins, as Blood and Lace (1971.) While there was some blood, there wasn't much lace. The title made precious little sense and the poster bore precious little relation to what actually occurs in the movie! The amusingly shoddy little flick boasted Oscar-winning actress Gloria Grahame as its principal "name."

Things kick off with a sleeping couple. The gal is coated down with makeup! (One point of trivia: This actress Louise Sherrill had directed a little-known horror flick of her own called Ghosts of Hanley House, 1968, and helped the director of this film secure locations.)

"Hammer time!"

As the couple continues to doze - presumably after having created the two-headed monster - we see POV shots with the hammer out front.

Soon enough, an assailant brings the hammer down and there is plenty of (very fake-looking) blood and an eye-rollingly artful method of filming the attack.

Not content, the killer next sets fire to the place. Some bedroom curtains appear to have been manufactured with synthetic chiffon and Butane! Ha ha!

Cut to a screaming young woman, awakening from a hideous nightmare. It's startling to discover Melody Patterson here. Having worked on F Troop from 1965-1967, I figured she was a mite old to be portraying a virtual minor, but in actual fact she was only 21 (!) which means she was a young teen on the western sitcom.

The nurse on duty is less-than-supportive of Patterson and her screams, while Milton Selzer is a big more sympathetic. Turns out that she is the daughter of the woman who's been killed. Mom was a real slut who eventually became a full-on prostitute.

'Course the biggest shock of all is listening as Patterson opens her mouth only to hear the voice of Rocky the Flying Squirrel come out!! (Patterson was sick with the flu on this filming day and had virtually no voice. Noted voice-over actress June Foray filled in, though why it couldn't either be looped later by Patterson or a less identifiable person hired to do it is unknown.)

Under 21 and under threat of being sent to a facility, Patterson sneaks out of the hospital under cover of night. Note the $0.79 sign used to signify the building!

As she tries to make her way down the sidewalk-less street, she is hounded by a car.

Inside the car is newly-annointed police detective Vic Tayback (later of Alice) who is interested in Patterson's welfare.

He convinces her to return to the hospital and face whatever decision is made with regards to her future.

Examining the ruins of the burnt house, Tayback finds the remnants of a hammer, the likely murder weapon.

Later, he and Selzer touch base at a local watering hole where they share information regarding the murder victim.

Tayback listens as Selzer relays info on a relatively new orphanage where Patterson will be sent until she turns 21.

The Deere Youth Home is an estate which has been converted to a county orphanage in the wake of the owner's death. Now run by his widow, it is home to a dozen or so parent-less kids. (Why all of them are mid-to-late teens and not one child is ever spotted is another mystery.)

The supper table is about to need one less plate because we meet this young man who is seen creeping out of the home at night with his suitcase.

Unfortunately, he's spotted by super-creepy caretaker Len Lesser, who tracks him through the nearby woods with a meat cleaver in his grasp!

Now, 20 minutes into the 1:26 movie, we meet Miss Gloria Grahame. She's the owner/operator of the youth home. She informs Lesser that they are going to be getting a new tenant the next morning. She also tells him that Selzer will be bringing her and, in the process, will be making his biannual inspection of the place.

Since Grahame gets $150.00/month for each teen in her care, she pretends that even the dead ones (!) are still living there. She had Lesser help set up the "Infirmary" with frozen corpses of three tenants who she keeps in the freezer down in the cellar!

Selzer arrives at the orphanage in this big ol' Ford station wagon and one can smell the leaded gas fumes as it ambles up into the driveway.

Grahame is pleasant enough to her new charge, but soon confides that she thinks the girl will be trouble. 

Patterson is sent outside to meet some of the other kids and comes upon Terri Messina. (Messina is presented as being 16 even though in real life she was three years older than Patterson!)

I don't guess apples fall too far from trees because in a nanosecond Patterson sees something she likes better...

Messina watches in irritation as Patterson makes her way over to a fast-dressing young man who also lives on site. Messina had stated that he was her boyfriend.

Patterson can hardly contain her glee when the young man (Ron Taft) informs her that he and Messina are definitely not an item. For my own part, the glee came in watching the handle of his sturdily-gripped tool grow...

...and grow...

...and GROW during their interaction!

Selzer wants to do a head count, so Grahame explains that a few of the occupants are under the weather (Lesser exclaims, "just a little cold"!) and prepares to let Selzer into the infirmary. But he opts out at the last second.

Instead they repair to her room for some tea and, it's heavily implied, a matinee of lovemaking! We're not spared much in this flick, but that's one bullet we do escape.

Patterson is roaming around the place, taking it all in. Somehow this old stove is supposed to be adequate in cooking for 14 or so people at a time! See how spoiled we are today?

She makes her way to the infirmary herself, which Grahame has inadvertently left unlocked.

Is the "blue flu" going around?! Patterson is stopped from getting a truly close look at the "sickly" students by Lesser.

Next, Grahame shows her to her room.

Naturally, her roomie is newfound frenemy Messina, but she mentions that it might not be a bad room after all considering the view outside.

While the place is strict and everyone has to work, there is at least a reasonable supper put before the kids. 

Seated next to Patterson is an impossibly young and gangly Dennis Christopher, who is always hungry and has tucked a spare dinner roll into his shirt.

Also nearby are Taft and Messina (sounds like a music act!) We really don't meet any of the rest of the orphans at the home.

While the youths are eating, we see Grahame's shadow on a wall as she gets various issues off her chest to an unseen listener.

She's back in any case quickly enough to ferret out Christopher's contraband dinner roll and berates him for trying to take it. (Why there are two bowls full of them on the table, then, remains a mystery.)

Hi! Meet Freddie, Daphne, Shaggy and Velma... Not.

In a rare moment of vulnerability, Grahame reveals how she was once young and beautiful and loved by her late husband. This is one "hag horror" entry in which the star was only going to let herself go so far when it came to styling. She was, after all, only 47 in any case!

Patterson, who can never leave well enough alone as often skulks around, finds herself in the cluttered attic of the youth home.

There, she's stunned to find a young girl tied to a post as an act of discipline. The gal is desperate for a drink, which Patterson vows to retrieve.

In the kitchen, however, Lesser will have none of that, and belligerently forces her to abandon the notion.

The next day, Tayback arrives on site and declares that he wants to check in on Patterson to see how she's adjusting to life there.

To him, she has few complaints while doing the ironing, despite having seen some immobile bodies in the infirmary and a girl tied to a post with no food or water!

Meanwhile, Grahame cruelly taunts the captive gal and takes a glass of water to the attic... to drink in front of her!

This interlude seems sponsored by Dentyne gum! Ha ha! (All the music for the film came from free library selections, making for an occasional chuckle whether intended or not.)

Something seems to be blossoming between these two.

However, when Taft defends Grahame as the center's proprietor and fails to believe that she's seen, a fight ensues.

The now-forlorn Patterson is wandering until she comes upon Lesser, who's wielding a hammer for some repairs. (BTW - What exactly was a person supposed to put in the pockets of her cute li'l blouse?)

He wants her to take the hammer as he comes down off the ladder, but it gives her an uneasy feeling. Gee... can't imagine why! He also tells her he knows a way she can escape and run away from the place.

This exchange is witnessed by an eavesdropping Taft.

Still loyal to Grahame, he runs and tells her that the two conspirators are about to meet up down in the cellar.

I'll mention now, with apologies to any who may be reading, that Taft's character name is the decidedly un-sexy "Walter!" (It may simply be that every Walter I have ever personally known was the antithesis of anything close to sexy, though.)

Downstairs, Patterson is finding out that she was sold a bill of goods and that Lesser had no intention of showing her a way out!

That's not to say there isn't something he'd like to show her.

Thanks for Taft's meddlesome tattling, Grahame comes downstairs before Lesser can do what he had in mind. She's not 100% happy with Patterson, even if she was duped.

Grahame decides that Patterson's punishment will be to clean up a storage shed that's fill, like many other rooms, with junk.

Taft confesses to her that it was he who blew the whistle on her escape attempt. Upon hearing this, she informs him that, as penance, he can clean out the shed!

Messina has not yet thrown in the towel and tries to tempt Taft with an itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny, yellow polka-dot bikini.

The man is human and he likes what he sees, but she remains unsuccessful in getting him to come her way.

Still experiencing nightmares, Patterson awakes screaming after imagining (or did she?!) a disfigured man with a hammer looming over her.

No one else seems to have seen or heard anything of the kind, though.

Things are no better with her roommate either. (I thought Messina had a sort of early Sandra Bullock thing going on here.)

Things aren't bad enough around there. We have to have a wild catfight on top of it!

The next day, Messina enlists Christopher to tell Taft that she wants to see him in the shed.

It's actually he who sees her, though!

Finally, he can't hold off any more and lies down with her, just as (the way Messina planned) Patterson comes looking for him.

Not only is she highly displeased by this little get-together, but she vows to Taft that she is leaving the youth home. Running away!

Still not quite getting it, Taft runs and tells on Patterson to Grahame again!

This calls for some more drastic action than they've used with her previously.

Initially, she's locked in her room, but she manages to get out.

Meanwhile Christopher, ever-starving, heads to the kitchen for some secret snacking.

Overhearing a scuffle, he follows Lesser to the cellar where he sees the henchman about to lock Patterson up in the freezer!

Grahame keeps the other kids busy in the yard during this melee.

It has to be said that these orphans spend hours and hours every day working in the yard (without the vaguest notion as to what the tools they are holding are meant to do!) and yet the dried-out, ugly, tan lawn looks like something worse than you'd expect at the house of the Addams Family!

Back in the deep-freeze, Patterson makes a few ghastly discoveries. I won't go any further into it, in case some masochistic viewers would like to experience this masterpiece for themselves. A beautifully done version can be seen here for free.

While this very low-budget movie was hardly a notable success (and it was reamed for containing a high level of violence for a GP-rated film), there are many who credit it with influencing later horror movies, even up to practically generating the "slasher movie." I must also say that the violence, by today's standards, is nothing too graphic. I'm not into a lot of significant bloodletting and I wasn't made uncomfortable during it.

This hilarious foreign lobby card has slightly more to do with the plot than the poster, though it may seem to some as if a serial killer wants to do in The King Sisters. That said, Patterson sometimes resembles Tina Cole if she were cast in a drekky horror flick!

Grahame, an Oscar-winner for The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), was not at the very end of her career when she made this movie. She continued to act up to the dawn of the 1980s. Having made an impression as a young lady (you may recall her from It's a Wonderful Life, 1946), she proceeded to key roles in Crossfire (1947), In a Lonely Place (1950), The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), Sudden Fear (1952) and one of the most memorable - Oklahoma! (1956.) However, an early work ethic began to morph into difficult behavior and she had a tendency to rub some of her costars the wrong way. This ultimately led to a decline in offers which hit hardest when her personal life went awry. She'd been wed and divorced from actor Nicholas Ray, married and divorced again to another man, then wed Ray's son, her former stepson (who she'd allegedly seduced years before!) With sons by both, one of her sons was her brother-in-law, too! It became a press fiasco and led to a nervous breakdown. When she returned, it was mostly on stage or television with only the occasional movie, though this improved as the '70s progressed. It was cancer that claimed her as she was in rehearsals for The Glass Menagerie. She died October 5th, 1981 at only 57.

In her day, Grahame was considered a sultry, seductive presence on screen. Always insecure about her looks, she was forever augmenting her upper lip, first with cotton under it and later with procedures which rendered it nearly immobile.

I haven't seen it, but Annette Bening played her in the 2017 movie Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool. Until I watched Blood and Lace, I didn't denote any resemblance between the two, but I can detect some here (even though this shot of Bening is not from the film in question!) The title is from a book the movie was based on. She'd been living in England, but her sons wanted her back in the US, whereupon she promptly died the day of her return! She'd been living with a partner 30 years her junior when the end came.

Patterson, who I must confess was pretty unfamiliar to me until just recently, was the daughter of a woman who'd been involved in pageants and work as a dancer in 1940s movies. A child model, ice skater and all around little performing dynamo, she attended the Hollywood Professional School and landed a bit role in Bye Bye Birdie (1963.) She then auditioned for the western-set sitcom F Troop, failing to come clean about her age to producers until she was selected for the role of "Wrangler Jane." Attending school on the lot while working on the series, she nonetheless fulfilled her duties without issue. (I had never once seen an episode of F Troop, a show teeming with stereotypes which now draw "cancellation" until a TV channel - appropriately called Outlaw! - recently began running it. So I became aware of her this way.) After the show's demise, she guest-starred on a few programs and did a couple of movies such as The Angry Breed (1967) and The Cycle Savages (1968.) Then came this one. But after marrying James MacArthur in 1970, she joined him in Hawaii as he costarred on Hawaii 5-O, appearing in guest roles three times herself. They divorced in 1977 an apart from one later low-budget movie, she didn't act again. Having pursued further education and developing a flair for writing, her health began to fail and she passed away in 2015 at only age 66.

Selzer was a very prolific character actor who popped up in countless movies and TV shows over the years. Having begun on Broadway in 1949, he moved to California a decade later and was quickly put to use. North to Alaska (1960), The Young Savages (1961), Marnie (1964), The Cincinnati Kid (1965) and The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968) are only a few of the movies he did, along with TV like Gunsmoke, The Untouchables and Get Smart. As the '70s dawned, he continued to work tirelessly as a guest on virtually any hit television series. Occasional movies included Capricorn One (1977) and Raise the Titanic (1980.) At home in both quality and camp, one of his last gigs was as a regular on the Sally Kirkland iteration of Valley of the Dolls in 1994! After 65 episodes and a couple of other parts, he retired to enjoy life with his wife of over 50 years. Selzer died in 2006 of stroke complications at age 87.

Born with a face that suggested menace or threat, Lesser was drawn to enlist in the army following the attack on Pearl Harbor, serving with distinction through WWII. Afterwards, he pursued acting and found success as hoodlums, soldiers, card players and everything else one might think of in movies and TV of the 1950s. Though not always cast as a bad guy, even his good guys (policemen for example) were world-weary and knowing, thanks to his strong visage. His output as a TV guest comes close to that of the aforementioned Selzer. After decades of sharing a prison cell with the star or intimidating this person or that, Lesser was cast as the enthusiastic Uncle Leo on Seinfeld. With 14 appearances on the smash sitcom, he was at last recognized by viewers. This was followed by a similar role on Everybody Loves Raymond, another hit show, on which he appeared 9 times. Actively working on TV until 2009, Lesser (who had already struggled with cancer) passed away of pneumonia in 2011 at age 88.

Tayback was another veteran (of the navy) who later pursued an acting career. He was a member of The Actors Studio, eventually making his way to television in the late-1950s. Having moved to California, he started to score roles in movies like Five Minutes to Live (1961, opposite Johnny Cash!), Five Weeks in a Balloon (1962) and Love with the Proper Stranger (1963.) He did many TV guest roles during the 1960s, including one on Patterson's F Troop, while popping up in films like With Six You Get Eggroll and Bullit (both 1968.) He continued in this vein until 1974 when he played a curmudgeonly diner owner/short order cook in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. This led to a resultant sitcom called Alice, in which he was the sole actor from the movie to retain his part of Mel. Alice was a long-running hit and Tayback's grouchy, but endearing, Mel became an indelible role. He won two Golden Globes for the part, losing once to John Hillerman of Magnum, P.I. A single Emmy nod was lost to Rob Reiner of All in the Family. Still busy up to 1990, he was felled by a heart attack at only age 60.

Messina is not a particularly well-known performer, though she did have a string of appearances in popular fare. Her first role in 1966 was opposite Jayne Mansfield in Single Room Furnished. She proceeded to guest roles on hit shows including Batman, I Dream of Jeannie, Ironside, Mannix, Love, American Style and Room 222. After Blood and Lace, Messina didn't act any further, but worked some behind the scenes and was the romantic partner of musician Gene Clark (of The Byrds.) In 2007, she died of undisclosed causes at age 61. (It's mere coincidence that my shot of her is close to - but not precisely the same! - as her imdb profile pic. Weird!)

Young Christopher was still in high school when he landed a part on Irwin Allen's The Time Tunnel. Apart from that and a little-seen student film, Blood and Lace was his debut. He proceeded to act in a broad spectrum of projects from drive-in fare like The Young Graduates (1971) to Roma (1972), directed by Frederico Fellini! Following a period of working for the designer Halston, Christopher returned to acting, with small roles in Robert Altman projects as well as other movies like September 30th, 1955 (1977) and California Dreaming (1979.) He also played Nick Adams (!) in Kurt Russell's Elvis. A major milestone was his role in Breaking Away (1979), a sleeper hit about bicycle racing. Another sort of racing, on foot, followed with Chariots of Fire (1981), a Best Picture Oscar-winner. Christopher played Jack (of Beanstalk fame) on Faerie Tale Theatre at age 33! Over the years, he has amassed a startlingly long list of credits on many TV shows such as Murder, She Wrote, Profiler, FreakyLinks, Deadwood and Graves - his last to date in 2016. Currently he is 73.

Taft began with the low-budget sexploitation flick Night of the Witches (1970), which left nowhere to go but up. After this, he guest-starred on Medical Center and Dan August. Blood and Lace marked the last on-screen acting he did until returning a decade later for bit roles on The Incredible Hulk and Simon & Simon. Occasional bits in straight-to-video fare and a stint on Days of Our Lives pretty much complete his acting resume. He wisely opted to make his mark instead as a successful ad executive. However...

We nonetheless appreciated his willingness to dot Blood and Lace with some much-needed and very welcome beefcake. But, wait, there's more. You won't believe who he is married to...!

Having first met in 1991, Taft has been the gleeful husband of Miss Lesley Ann Warren since 2000. The ebullient twosome have been spotted time and again at industry events. Warren (of 1965's Cinderella) kissed several frogs, but appears to have finally met her Prince Charming.