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If you don't know who Jon Hall was, you can be forgiven. In the late
1930's and 40's (and on television in the 1950's), Hall was a star
alright, but he wasn't a star because he was such a great actor - he
actually wasn't too strong in that department - but because he was a symbol of a
certain kind of escapism that was extremely popular especially in wartime
USA, he was the male hero in quite a number of exotic adventure-romances
that usually starred either Dorothy Lamour or Maria Montez opposite him
and that told larger-than-life love stories and fantastic tales in faraway
countries that were full of action and adventure - and were usually shot in
breathtaking and suggestive Technicolor - in other words exactly what an
audience in a country at war wanted to see in the moviehouses. And
accordingly, when World War II had ended, Jon Hall's star started to fade
until his career was given a new boost only by television, where formulaic
stories not too far from his most successful movies reigned supreme in the
1950's.
Early Life, Early Career Jon
Hall's heritage and early life suggests he was born to do just what he did
later on, so much so that at least some of it sounds made up by some
studio's ad department rather than anything else. Hall was born Charles
Felix Locher in Fresno, California in 1915 to Swiss Felix Locher (who
depending to reports was either a world champion iceskater or an inventor,
and who actually turned to acting only way past retirement age) and a
Tahitian princess. His uncle was writer James Norman Hall, who (together
with Charles Nordhoff) did not only write Mutiny on the Bounty but
also The Hurricane, the book Hall's breaktrhough movie (see below)
was based on. Jon Hall grew up tall and strong in Tahiti and eventually
became the island's swimming champion. Eventually, Jon Hall
made it back to California (where he was born), met, fell in love with,
and married singer Frances Langford in 1934. The marriage would last until
1955. In 1934, Langford was just on the verge of becoming the radio- and
moviestar she is now known to have been, but when she landed her first role in a
feature film one year later - a supporting role in the George Raft-starrer
Every Night at Eight (1935, Raoul Walsh) -, Hall also had his first
bit parts in movies like Women Must Dress (1935, Reginald Barker)
and Here's to Romance (1935, Alfred E.Green), and a bigger role in Charlie
Chan in Shanghai (1935, James Tinling) starring Warner Oland. Back
then, he wasn't billed Jon Hall though but by his real name Charles
Locher.
Back in the mid-1930's, it wasn't a bad idea for
swimmers to come to Hollywood, as swimchamps Johnny Weissmuller [Johnny
Weissmuller bio - click here] and Buster Crabbe [Buster
Crabbe bio - click here] had both just kickstarted their
careers turning in successful
performances as Tarzan,
and following that, actors of muscular built were in high demand. And
speaking of Buster Crabbe: There is a rumour that Jon Hall was actually
screen-tested for Crabbe's later signature role Flash
Gordon - though it is not known if he was ever seriously
considered ...
The comparison with Weissmuller and Crabbe is
also interesting inasmuch as, just as these two, Jon Hall had his first
lead role in a film based on a story by Edgar Rice Burroughs (even if it
was no Tarzan-novel):
The Lion Man (1936, John
P. McCarthy) - and with some justification, several critics labelled
The Lion Man Tarzan
of the desert, since the similarities are striking: Like Tarzan,
Lion Man's lead
character El Lion (Hall of course) lost his parents at a young age, grew
up in the wilderness (desert instead of jungle) guarded by savage beasts
(with lions replacing apes), and now is a self-appointed protector of
justice of almst superhuman strength.
However, Hall's desert
adventure was produced by small-time studio Normandy
Pictures on the cheap, was sloppily directed, features none of the
exotic locale the story asks for, and even the lions can only be seen in a
few shots where they don't interact with human actors - and thus, The Lion Man
caused little more than a ripple in the movie world and
did little to further Hall's career.
In fact, after
The Lion Man, it was right back to supporting roles for Jon Hall, like
appearances in the B-Westerns The Mysterious Avenger (1936, David
Selman) - which featured an early appearance by Roy Rogers and the Sons of
the Pioneers [Roy Rogers bio -
click here] - and the John Wayne starrer Winds
of the Wasteland (1936, Mack V.Wright) [John
Wayne in the 1930's - click here], or the less-than-perfect
serial The Clutching Hand
(1936, Albert Herman). In fact, by 1936 Hall's career seems to have been
going to nowhere in particular to such an extent that he underwent a
name-change - he called himself Lloyd Crane from now on - and nobody seemed to notice
much. Likewise, the two films he made as Lloyd Crane, the Charles
Ruggles-comedy Mind Your Own Business (1936, Norman Z. McLeod) and
the mystery The Girl from Scotland Yard (1937, Robert G. Mignola),
are hardly worth a mention.
The Hurricane and Dorothy Lamour
In 1937, Hall finally got the chance to act in a film that seems to
have been tailored for him (and he changed his name to Jon Hall for it), John Ford's The
Hurricane. In this film, a lavish South Seas tale, he plays a
naive native who is unjustly thrown into prison, but he defeats the odds
and after a myriad of attempts succeeds to break out and return to his wife
(Dorothy Lamour), and he proves himself to be a righteous enough man in
the end, when he saves not only his family but also the wife (Mary Astor)
of his enemy (Raymond Massey) from a hurricane that (in a stunning
setpiece) destroys the whole island. Sure, neither was Hall's role too
demanding nor does he make too much attempts to rise it above the level of
mediocrity, but Hall's native was never supposed to be a multi-layered character role
but demanded an actor with somewhat exotic good looks (and remember, Hall
was of half-Tahitian descent), who has an appealing torso (he's topless
for most of the film), and who can swim like a fish (after all, he was
Tahitian swimming champion, right?). And that Hall's uncle James Norman
Hall had co-written the book Ford's film was based on can't have hurt
either ...
Hall's thespian limitations however are off-set by a
great cast of supporting actors incluging Raymond Massey, Thomas Mitchell, C.Aubrey Smith and John
Carradine [John Carradine bio
- click here] at his most despicable, plus the film features
outdoors camerawork that is simply as great as you would expect it to be
from a South Seas-based movie that puts an emphasis on the exotic aspects
of the story. A few word about Jon Hall's leading lady Dorothy
Lamour: Her performance is about as bland as Hall's, however, her role is
even more limited, she gets very little to do other than to stare longingly into
the distance. Similar to Hall, she was only at the start of her
moviecareer. Only the previous year did she get her first big break in The
Jungle Princess (1936, William Thiele), the film that would typecast
her for jungle girl and island girl movies (or sarong-movies, taking their
name from Lamour's textile choice in these films) for pretty mucht the
rest of her career - and of course, The
Hurricane was one such movie. However, Lamour would soon prove her
talents in comedy especially in the Road
to ...-series starring Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, starting with
Road to Singapore
(1940, Victor Schertzinger) - in which she plays yet another island girl. After
having shot to fame with The
Hurricane ... Jon Hall took a three-year career break. Now that
might sound stupid, but one has to understand that Hall never saw acting
as a vocation but a means for making money, and money he did make with
Ford's film ... In 1940, Jon Hall returned to the big screen
with Sailor's Lady (Allan Dwan), a so so B-comedy with a nautical
theme in which Hall plays the titular Sailor, Nancy Kelly plays his
girlfriend, and Dana Anddrews and Buster Crabbe [Buster
Crabbe bio - click here] are also featured. In Sailor's
Lady, Jon Hall wasn't exactly a fish out of water (after all, he would
play sailors quite frequently in his career), but with his next film, South
of Pago Pago (1940, Alfred E.Greene), he returned to more familiar
terrain, namely the South Seas. Without ever reaching the quality of The
Hurricane, this movie tries to recreate its mix of exotic action,
adventure and romance, with Hall once again playing a naive islander. This
time, Frances Farmer plays his love interest, and Victor McLaglen can be
seen as the baddie.
After South
of Pago Pago, Jon Hall
tried his hands on the Western genre playing the titular character in Kit
Carson (George B. Seitz), but the Western was a genre a man of Hall's slightly exotic good looks just wasn't cut out for, plus he lacked the
charisma to properly come off as tough guy ... so it should hardly come as a
surprise that Hall next starred in yet another film set in the South Seas,
Aloma of the South Seas (1941, Alfred Santell), in which he once
again plays an islander, which once again ends in a natural disaster (this
time a volcano eruption and an earthquake), and in which his love interest
is once again played by Dorothy Lamour. Again, this film cannot compete
with The
Hurricane, and one can't fail to notice a formula starting to
emerge in Hall's films ... a formula his next film, The Tuttles of
Tahiti (1942, Charles Vidor), somewhat spoofs. Yet in all, the film,
which stars Charles Laughton, is too harmless and good-natured to come off
as a good parody.
After that, and with the USA having just
entered World War II, Jon Hall went to war as well - in the movie Eagle
Squadron (1942, Arthur Lubin). The film's actual lead is Robert Stack,
and so the film would be of minor importance to Jon Hall's career - wasn't
it for the fact that it was his first film with Universal,
the studio that would produce almost all of Hall's films while on the
height of his career.
Before Hall's career hit its all-time
high though, Universal
tested his potential in a film of the Invisible
Man-series, Invisible
Agent (1942, Edwin L.Marin), which transplanted H.G.Wells'
character into World War II. The outcome is nothing more than a silly
propaganda movie that wastes Peter Lorre [Peter
Lorre bio - clck here] as a Japanese baddie (in a film
primarily set in Germany), but Jon Hall is able to keep up with the plot
acting-wise so that he would not only land the lead in another Invisible
Man-film, Invisible
Man's Revenge (1944, Ford L.Beebe) two years later but also get roles in
bigger and better Universal-productions
...
Maria Montez (and
a bit of Sabu)
Of course, the heads at Universal
were neither oblivious of Jon Hall's previous successes and of his
limitations as an actor, but the good-looking, well-built exotic hero-type
was just what they needed for their next film, the escapist adventure Arabian
Nights (1942, John Rawlins). Hall's role of the rightful and
righteous caliph wronged out of his throne was pretty much as bland as all
the naive, lovesick islanders he had played in earlier movies, but he
wasn't the actual attraction of the film anyways, it was the lavisl colours
of Technicolor (Arabian
Nights was Universal's
first film shot in that process), its exotic psuedo-Arabian sets and its
wildly romantic adventure plot - which was exactly what the war-weary
audiences were looking for in moviehouses those days. Universal
had also found the congenial screen partner for Jon Hall: Maria Montez.
Originally a model of Spanish and Caribbean descent, Ms Montez could not
really act, her accent was too strong for most mainstream fare, and even
her dancing skills were limited (though she plays a dancing girl in Arabian
Nights) - but she was exatly right for the exotic adventures she
was about to shoot with Jon Hall: She had an exotic aura around her, a
fiery temperament that had to be tamed, she looked great as the
damsel-in-distress (and she was in distress very often in her films), and
what she lacked in dancing skills, she made up in revealing outfits. And
of course she was very beautiful and had sex appeal that couldn't even
be fully contained in the a tad childish adventures she starred in. She
probably didn't possess half of Dorothy Lamour's acting talent, but her looks and
charisma perfectly complimented Jon Hall's usually a bit too clean-cut hero. The
actual top-billed star of Arabian
Nights however was neither Hall nor Montez but Sabu. Sabu was an
Indian-born juvenile actor who back then after the success of both Thief
of Bagdad (1940, Ludwig Berger, Michael Powell, Tim Whelan) and Jungle
Book (1942, Zoltan Korda) was at the height of his popularity. And
he was of course just right for this Arabian fantasy, not only because his
experience in Thief of
Bagdad, but also because of his unmistakably exotic looks and
accent, and his agility, that is put to good use in Arabian
Nights, as it was in his earlier films. In all, Arabian
Nights served the perfect recipe for audiences of its day, from
story to cast, from sets and settings to costumes and colours, and it was
the perfect formula that drove the masses into the movie theatres - yet Arabian
Nights is not a film that stands the test of time: Its story is
rather clumsily told, lacks all fantasy elements the title alone would
suggest, the nominal lead Sabu is reduced to play cupid in the half-baked
love-story between Hall and Montez, and the plot's adventure elements are
continually outweighed by the romance aspects of the story as well as some
mediocre comedy. Sure, the
film is still high camp, but not half as enjoyable as other comparable
films from its period - including some of the later Hall-Montez
collaborations.
My criticism notwithstanding of course, Arabian
Nights became a big hit at the box office, so another film starring the trio Hall-Montez-Sabu was
rushed into production and released theatrically only 4 months later, White
Savage (1943, Arthur Lubin). This time, Hall plays a shark hunter and
Montez the princess of an island where Hall wants to hunt but is forbidden
by the island's law. Sabu is a native boy who arranges a meeting between
Hall and Montez, and of course the two gradually fall in love. Turhan Bey,
who was also in Arabian
Nights, and Sidney Toler in Oriental makeup were also on board of White
Savage. And if anybody had any doubts if Universal
were trying out a formula to fit Jon Hall and Maria Montez into with Arabian
Nights, White Savage would be able proof
of that ... and
the audience was more than willing to embrace this formula, and thus White
Savage became another big success for the studio.
For the
next Hall-Montez spectacle, Sabu was left behind, even though the film
moved back into Arabian Nights territory: Ali Baba and the Forty
Thieves (1944, Arthur Lubin), a very free retelling of the classic
tale. Like the earlier two films of the duo, it's an escapist adventure
full of romance and intrigue in wonderful Technicolor that gave the
audience exactly what it wanted and expected, but not an ounce more.
After Ali Baba and the Forty
Thieves, Jon Hall strayed from the flock for a bit, took a break from the
series and moved over to Paramount
to play a supporting role in a Ginger Rogers-musical, Lady in the Dark
(1944, Mitchell Leisen), but it was before the year 1944 was half over
that he returned to Universal
and to Maria Montez to star in what is probably the best of the
Hall-Montez-picutres, Cobra
Woman (1944, Robert Siodmak).
Cobra
Woman is of course no masterpiece, but other than the previous
films of the cycle, it puts an emphasis on not only exotic settings and
romance but also on mystery, fantasy and adventure, features a bunch of
quite impressive sets, an enjoyable and enjoyably silly South Seas-set
story about snake people, human sacrifices and a good-twin-bad-twin
constellation, and veteran Siodmak also knows how to use the Technicolor
process to properly create atmosphere and not just drown everything in
fancy colours. The outcome is not necessarily a movie to be taken
seriously, but a piece of pure and highly enjoyable gem - and one of
Kenneth Anger's favourite films by the way, if that says anything about
the film.
By the way, Sabu was on board on Cobra
Woman once more, but it would remain his last film with Hall.
After above-mentioned rather weak Invisible
Man's Revenge, Jon Hall and Maria Montez teamed up yet again for Gypsy
Wildcat (1944, Roy William Neill), which was a bit of a departure from
the familiar formular inasmuch as it was not some romance/adventure hybrid
set somewhere in the Orient or the South Seas but a swashbuckler set in an
indeterminable time period in Europe. Maria Montez plays the Gypsy
Wildcat of the title of course while Jon Hall is the dashing hero and
as such a bit of a wannabe-Errol Flynn. To say Gypsy Wildcat would
be a total departure from the typical Hall-Montez formula would be quite
an exaggeration though, it's just not exactly what you've come to expect
from the couple. Jon Hall's next film, San Diego, I Love You
(1944, Reginald Le Borg) on the other hand is much more a departure from
what one has come to know and expect from him, a screwball comedy in which
Hall plays a reclusive millionaire whom Louise Allbritton desperately
tries to sell one of her father's inventions. But to be honest, pretty
much everyone in the cast is funnier and has funnier situations to master
than Jon Hall. Buster Keaton [Buster
Keaton bio - click here] can be seen in this one in a
supporting role by the way. Oh, and there is no Maria Montez in this one. Maria
Montez was back at Jon Hall's side in Sudan
(1945, John Rawlins), a
romance/adventure romp set in Ancient Egypt and bare of any historical
accuracy. Instead it has Hall and Montez going through the motions in
unfamiliar yet not all that unexpected settings, aided once again by
Turhan Bey, this time playing Hall's friend yet rival for Montez's
affections - who in an unexpected twist gets Montez in the end -, and
the villainy is provided by George Zucco [George
Zucco bio - click here]. Sudan
is no
better or worse than the bulk of the Hall-Montez collaborations, yet it
would remain their last film together. Basically, the novelty of these
films and of Technicolor as such had just worn off, and the end of World
War II, with the return of a large male audience segment from the front,
hardened by wartime experiences, meant a change in audience tastes of
course. Maria Montez, whose acting range was extremely limited, stuck
around in the USA for a while and made a few more escapist adventures -
including one more with Sabu, Tangier (1946, George Waggner) -,
with diminishing success, before she moved to Europe, where production of escapist adventures that had just fallen out of favour with the American
audiences was beginnig to find a footing. In 1951 though, she was found dead
in her bathtub in Paris, France, and she possibly drowned after suffering
a heart attack. Hall remained in America, but like Montez's, his career
went downhill, though he tried to revive it ever so often - with
alternating success, but more about that below. What remains of
Hall and Montez's body of work are not great films, but gems when it comes
to pure camp, movies that would take you to exotic fairytale worlds that
were almost entirely manufactured at the Universal-backlot
(and thus invariably had a colourful but unreal look to them), stories
bare of historical accuracies that are even untrue to their sources (if
there were some), but that have simply sprung from their scriptwriters'
imagination, which are only limited by the films' comparatively low
budgets. Seeing these films today, it's no wonder they appeal especially to the
gay community ... though everybody will be able to enjoy them
to some degree provided one takes them for the silly pieces of escapism
they are ...
Decline and
Comeback(s) With the audience no longer being interested in
the dreamteam of Jon Hall and Maria Montez and their subsequent split, Universal
did not drop their erstwhile top leading man right away but tried him
out in a handful of other vehicles:
- Men in her Diary (1945, Charles Barton) is essentially a
comedy tailored to fit singer/dancer Peggy Ryan (even though she
neither sings nor dances), and in it, Hall plays her boss whose
marriage to Louise Allbritton gets into jeopardy because of Ryan's
made-up diary entries.
- The Michigan Kid and The Vigilantes Return (both 1947,
Ray Taylor) are pretty much your run-of-the-mill B-Westerns, with Hall
in the lead failing to fully convince.
Eventually, Jon Hall moved over from Universal
to Columbia,
which had a few well-sounding projects for him in the pocket:
- Last of the Redmen (1947, George Sherman) was based on Last
of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper, in which
top-billed Hall doesn't get to play Hawkeye though but the rather
secondary role of Major Duncan Heyward. Michael O'Shea is Hawkeye by
the way, while Buster Crabbe finds himself in a rather unexpected
role, playing evil Indian chieftain Magua [Buster
Crabbe bio - click here].
- In Prince of Thieves (1948, Howard Bretherton), Jon Hall
actually got to play Robin
Hood.
- Finally, with The Mutineers (1949, Jean Yarbrough [Jean
Yarbrough bio - click here]), Jon Hall returned to the
sea, playing a sailor trying to catch a counterfeiter ring and clear
his dead friend's name.
As interesting as these projects might sound on paper though, one has
to bear in mind that they were all produced by Sam Katzman, a - shall we
say - cost-conscious producer, and thus the resulting films were not
exactly amazing, with neither Last of the Redmen
nor Prince of
Thieves being among the more well-known adaptations of their source
materials.
After above trio of films, Hall would leave Katzman and Columbia
for a while to do some free-lancing for smaller studios, with limited
success ...
- His film Zamba
(1949, William Berke) for Conn
Pictures, a movie about a boy (then child actor Beau Bridges)
striking a friendship with a gorilla (Ray Crash Corrigan [Crash
Corrigan bio - click here]) is actually among the weakest
junge/gorilla movies ever made.
- Deputy Marshal (1949, William Berke) for Lippert is little
more than another misguided attempt to find a footing in B-Westerns.
On the Isle of Samoa (1950, William Berke), a Columbia-production,
would take Jon Hall back to the South Seas again. In this one, he plays a
crook who, while on his escape by plane, crashlands on an island paradise
and now tries to persuade the natives to build an airstrip so he can
return to civilisation again. The island girl is played by the
less-than-exotic 1950's B-heroine Susan Cabot in this one - but she sure
is no Dorothy Lamour or Maria Montez. Also, the film's black-and-white is
no match for the wonderful Technicolor of Hall's Universal-epics.
Still, his performance in On the Isle of Samoa must have been
well enough for the heads of Columbia
(and made them enough money) to cast Jon Hall in a handful of other
adventure films that were reminiscent of his earlier successes (without
matching them in quality):
- China Corsair (1951, Ray Nazarro) sees Hall as a
down-on-his-luck sailor who gets mixed up with pirates led by
beautiful Lisa Ferraday through no fault of his own.
- In Hurricane Island (1951, Lew Landers), Jon Hall is part of
an expedition searching for the Fountain of Youth in the Forida
swamps led by (historical character) Ponce de León (Edgar Barrier) in
the early 1500's.
- Last Train from Bombay (1952, Fred F.Sears) is a Indian-set
spy adventure, and definitely not one of the better ones.
Apart from these adventure yarns, Jon Hall was also in a couple of
B-Westerns produced by Columbia
during the early 1950's, the despicably titled When the Redskins Rode (1951, Lew Landers)
and Brave Warrior (1952, Spencer Gordon Bennet), but they are
hardly worth a mention ...
Having been pigeon-holed early in his career and having shown little
efforts to escape typecasting ever since, it must have come as a bit of
surprise that in 1952, 15 years after his breakthrough with The
Hurricane, Jon Hall finally managed to shake his so far prevalent
image of the island boy/adventurer/sailor and become someone else - at
least on the small screen.
Of course, from his roles so far it wasn't too big a step to becoming Ramar
of the Jungle (1952-54), the jungle doctor who gets into an
exciting jungle adventure week after week for two seasons, and several of
the situations in this series were actually borrowed from his earlier
films (which often borrowed these situations from elsewhere to begin
with), but in all, Ramar was a character independent enough from his
former work Hall was qickly identified with, and even though he back then
still wasn't too much of an actor, he was able to give his character some
dignity and sincerity.
Ramar
of the Jungle was probably one of the more entertaining
jungle adventure series of the 1950's, inasmuch as it at times mixed
horror (e.g. Lady
of the Leopards), science fiction (e.g. Dark
Venture) and whodunnit (e.g. Voice
of the Past) motives with its more customary jungle adventure
stories, was shot by B-movie veterans Sam Newfield, Spencer Gordon Bennet,
Wallace Fox and Paul Landres, and it even moved from Africa to India for
half a season, just to add change to the proceedings. Also the persistent
use of black actors in prominent roles is more than some other African-set
jungle adventure series of the time could claim for themselves. Sure, the
black actors, first and foremost Nick Stewart as Ramar's guide, were
usually shown in subservient roles, but even that was quite an achievement
for its time.
After Ramar
of the Jungle finished in 1954 after just two seasons, Jon
Hall took another three-year break from acting before returning with Hell
Ship Mutiny (1957, Lee Sholem, Elmo Williams), a Republic
production [Republic history -
click here] that Hall partly financed himself, not only to
kickstart his career once more but also to advertise his newly formed
underwater movie equipment rental business - and as an actor who had been
in numerous South Seas adventures and island girl movies who was a champion
swimmer on top of that, he was of course the perfect spokesperson for a
business like this. Hardly surprisingly then, Hell
Ship Mutiny was more than a little reminiscent of Hall's former
hits from The
Hurricane onwards, also because the emphasis on underwater scenes
pretty much came with the plot.
That all said, Hell
Ship Mutiny, a film in which hero Hall saves a tribe of natives in
the South Seas from a gang of greedy baddies led by The
Hurricane's John Carradine [John
Carradine bio - click here] pales in comparison to Hall's
earlier efforts, which is at least partly to blame on the film's low
budget, lack of Technicolor (the film was shot in black and white) and
lack of a competent leading lady (Roberta Haynes as island girl sure
enough was no Dorothy Lamour or even Maria Montez). At least Peter Lorre [Peter
Lorre bio - click here] as fake commissioner gives an
amusing performance though.
And by the way, this was the acting debut of Felix Locher, Jon Hall's
father who by the time this was made was already 75 years of age. He would
launch a prolific career as a character actor with this one though that
lasted until his death in
1969.
In 1959, Columbia,
Hall's part-time home during the early 1950's, produced another South Seas
adventure starring Hall, Forbidden Island (Charles B.Griffith), in
which he plays a skindiver searching for a hidden treasure, but with Hall
now in his mid-40's, he was getting a bit old for this sort of role ...
The next few years saw Hall doing nothing acting-wise apart from a few
guest appearances in TV-shows. It wasn't until 1965 actually that Jon Hall
returned to the big screen, and in a movie he not only starred in (in a
bad guy role, actually) but also directed: The
Beach Girls and the Monster.
With some justification one could call the beach party films that
especially AIP
produced very successfully a evolutionary continuation of the island
girl-movies Jon Hall had starred in throughout his career. Sure, the most
heroic deed the heroes of this new breed of films were doing was ride their
surfboards, and sure the locale was suddenly less than exotic and the island
girls were homegrown and have switched their sarongs for bikinis, but
in their own very modest way, the beach party films were as escapist as
the island girl films before them, were putting an emphasis on scantily
clad women (and usually more than one) and showed a certain fascination
for the sea. And that these new films were comedies rather than dramas was
just a way to better meet the (teenage) audience's tastes. Now I'm of
course aware that there are at least as many reasons as to why the beach
party movies are not the continuation of Hall's island girl films, but in
the context of The
Beach Girls and the Monster that's completely besides the point.
If beach party fims were cheap versions of island girl films though
(which weren't necessarily expensive to begin with), then The
Beach Girls and the Monster was a cheap version of a beach party
film, using only a very small number of less-than-fancy sets, offering
little in terms of action (apart from the obvious surfing footage), and
the monster shown is among of the silliest and cheapest looking creatures
of the 1960's. That all said though, the film in which maritime scientist
Hall dresses up as a monster to kill his way through the surfing crowd to
keep his son from their influence, is great fun.
To noone's real surprise, the film was not a great success (though it
might have made its money back) as it was as bad as it was underbudgeted,
and a silly script didn't help much either - but it has since become a
favourite with the trash movie crowd ...
After The
Beach Girls and the Monster, Jon Hall retired from acting (very
much unlike his father, see above), and apart from the occasional
underwater photography on films like the eco-documentary Survival
of Spaceship Earth (1972, Dirk Wayne Summers) he had retired from the
film industry.
In 1979, Hall had surgery from bladder cancer, surgery that
unfortunately was not quite the success it was supposed to be. He was in pain and bed-ridden
for most of the
time afterwards, and in December of the same year he decided to end his agony
and shot himself. He was 64. His last public appearance, only a few months
before his death, was of all things at the premiere of the (now long
forgotten) 1979 film Hurricane (Jan Troell), a remake of his
breakthrough hit.
To claim that Jon Hall had any lasting effects on film history would be
nothing short of an exaggeration, but many of his films as well as his
TV-series Ramar
of the Jungle can be seen as mirrors of their time and great
pieces of nostalgia, and despite or because of all their inconsistencies,
their camp style, their budgetary restraints, their narrative
shortcomings, they attract new audiences even today.
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