Let me say at the start that even though this odd, apocalyptic British film is a golem movie, it’s not an especially Jewish movie. Although they share a title, 1967’s “It!” is unrelated to the Stephen King novel of the same name, or the films adapted from them, which also feature a Jewish character and will be addressed later in this book.
Despite the fact that the film lacks a certain Jewishness, I include it in this collection because I find it interesting to see what non-Jewish filmmakers do with Jewish subject matter. Yes, that’s what I tell myself, yes, to sound reasonable.
But the fact is I include it because of it sheer, delicious oddness, and because it has Roddy McDowall in it.
I have now and have always had a fondness for actor Roddy McDowall. I am told when I was a boy he toured the various zoos in America to promote the “Planet of the Apes” television show, and that he leapt out a seized me and lifted me into the air dressed as a chimpanzee.
This seems unlikely. I was seized by a man in an ape costume, but why would it be McDowall? Behind the makeup, who would even know? Nonetheless, it persists as a family legend, and has made me feel a certain connection to the actor, even if it is a fanciful one.
McDowall was a child actor in England who became a child actor in America, appearing opposite Elizabeth Taylor in the original film adaptation of “Lassie Come Home” when both were still quite young.
They remained lifelong friends and navigated the complicated transition from child actor to adult actor together, occasionally still sharing the screen -- both were in “Cleopatra” in 1963. Taylor was, of course, the star of the film, having grown into one of the world’s most successful lead actresses. McDowall was what he wound up being -- a slightly eccentric character actor.
McDowall could carry a movie, but his lead roles typically happened in genre films, as in the “Planet of the Apes” series, where he gradually came to the forefront as the main character, even starring in the television show that marked my childhood. He had a distinctive voice, a high tenor that sounded at once intelligent and strained, with a precise, clipped London accent, and as a result he also often did voice work.
McDowall acted in a sort of demonstrative pre-Method style: he had big emotions and let them play right on the surface. It’s a style that might seem a little mannered, but British people always seem a bit mannered, and so it played well in 1960s and 70s films. He often played his character as being a bit too delicate for the story their are part of; that is the case here, as I shall describe.
This sort of emotionalism often worked quite well in horror films, which are a generally places of big emotions. He did a film relatively late in his career called “Fright Night” where he played an aging horror movie actor who is enlisted to help battle actual vampires. The whole film is an unexpectedly unsubtle metaphor for the LGBTQ experience.
There is a scene in the film where a young man is accosted by a vampire and talked into allowing himself to be bitten. It plays out as a seduction, with the vampire monologizing about the anguish of being an outsider. Later, McDowall will kill this boy, and his death will be agonizing. McDowall’s performance during the death is splendid, anguished, heartbroken. He himself was reported to be gay, and the sequence seems to reflect and comment on tragedy of youthful death, which is not what you expect when someone has just staked the undead.
McDowall was not Jewish, if I have not made that clear. He was Catholic, although he was his own sort of London minority, as he had an Irish mother and Scottish father. London is not an un-Jewish place, but, as I have mentioned, this is an un-Jewish film. As far as I can tell, nobody who had significant involvement in the film was Jewish, including writer/director Herbert J. Leder. And so the film is largely unconcerned with the Jewishness of the golem story, even when Roddy McDowall finds a golem in a museum warehouse.
That’s not to say the film’s golem is entirely divorced from Jewish history. Although this one is made from stone, rather than mud, it is supposed to be the famous Prague Golem created by Rabbi Judah Leow. The film also did enough research to know there are other golem stories, and even bring a rabbi in at one point to translate a Hebrew inscription.
But these are gestures at Judaism. The golem in this film primarily serves as a monster, and as an especially flat monster at that. He is, to the film’s credit, a horrific looking thing, a giant with a narrow, twisted head that looks at though somebody had tried to build a human out of a stalk of asparagus. But he is less a classic movie monster than a sort of supernatural automaton, a sort of destructive robot that can be aimed at anything and will mutely tear it down.
But a film about a weapon isn’t a monster movie. Thankfully, this film actually has a monster, and it is McDowall. We learn this very early on when the character he plays, a twitchy assistant curator at a museum, returns home to his mother. She is a taxidermied mummy, like Norman Bates’ mother, and McDowall talks to her as though she were still alive. He doesn’t think she is, as this is an element borrowed from “Psycho” but not quite stolen from it. Instead, McDowall is a bit of a psychic, and communicated with her spirit.
This talent comes in handy when he discovers the golem, and the film suggests, without making explicit, that he quickly develops a psychic bond with the statue that causes it to kill anyone he is irritated with. He is easily irritated, so bodies start mysteriously piling up underneath the statue.
McDowall’s control of the creature is, at first, accidental, but soon he discovers a scroll that, when placed in the statue’s mouth, makes the statue mobile.
Sort of. As killing machines go, this one is lethargic, meandering from place to place. It scarcely seems worth worrying about, except that McDowall has decided to show off for a disinterested young woman (Jill Haworth), and, being mad, his idea of showing off it to have the golem tear down a bridge. As mentioned, McDowall is a bit delicate for this sort of destruction: Ordering a man killed, he turns and shields his eyes, pleased to have the power to take life but too squeamish to witness it. He will overcome that quickly; by the end of the film he will burn a woman alive in a fit of anger.
The film grows increasingly apocalyptic. The golem comes with an inscribed warning in Hebrew, not present in the original myth, that has it gaining strength every 100 years, to the point of genocidal indestructibility by the start of the 21st century. The warning is clear that, if the golem had its druthers, it would cleanse the earth of human life. Fortunately, all one needs to do to stop this is to remove the scroll from its mouth.
Alas, McDowall is both mad and bad at controlling a golem. There is a scene where he is confronted by an American curator, plated by the stern-voiced Paul Maxwell. The American makes a list of everything you should not do with a golem and McDowall, to his own growing horror, confessing he has done every one of them. And what of the scroll? Even the scroll, which McDowall impulsively ordered the golem to swallow.
Needless to say, it all ends rather poorly. McDowall, unseen, is caught in the explosion of a small atomic bomb the British government has decided to use on the golem. The statue survives the blast and walks out into the ocean, where, one presumes, it will return sometime this century to begin the grim, unstoppable task of exterminating humanity.
It’s an interesting elaboration on the golem mythology, which, after all, was a tool of the Jewish community against their destruction. Some versions of the golem story have the monster go on a rampage, and there is a thematic ingenuity to elaborating on that, making the golem capable of exterminating human life, including that of the Jews. One could dig about in the story for the idea that the weapons we make to defend us can also be used to destroy us, and destroy yet more -- a really powerful weapon might destroy beyond our ability to comprehend.
This would be a fine story if it were one told by Jews about Jews. Unmoored from that setting, it becomes very strange, far more concerned with McDowall’s florid, selfish evil than with a morality play about the dangers of welding too much power, or the wrong sort of power.
And ultimately that’s just fine. It’s a very weird movie. It’s attention is probably best placed on its weirdest character.
