THE MAD MAGICIAN

"I don't play monsters.  I play men besieged by fate and out for revenge"--Vincent Price

Well, I went to THE MAD MAGICIAN at the Revue as planned.  It's a 1954 3-D thriller with a Gay '90s setting, clearly intended to repeat Vincent Price's success in 3-D HOUSE OF WAX the year before.  It doesn't have the man playing with the bolo bat, but the script is more clever.  Price plays a magician who finds he's lost the rights to the contraptions he created, motivating a killing spree.  A master of disguise, he steals his victims' identities in a twist no doubt borrowed from Camus' existential novel L'ETRANGER. (Only steal from the best!)

The leading lady is Mary Murphy, whose main claim to fame was THE WILD ONE the same year.  She had the immortal goofy line "My father was going to take me on a fishing trip in Canada once." This was the era when the big studios reciprocated their unlimited access to Canadian markets by inserting references to Canada into lots of scripts.  Another example is the Western BEND OF THE RIVER, where Jimmy Stewart says about a flock of birds, "They come from Canada."

And of course there are the 3-D gimmicks, like when Price concludes a magic performance by pointing his wand at the camera and having it squirt water. (Movies of the '50s were full of such corny phallus symbolism.  I remember the scene in the Doris Day vehicle CALAMITY JANE where a soldier had been tied to a tree by Native Americans, but not in the conventional way:  he was sitting with his legs forming a V-shape, with the tree inside the V-shape's corner!)

Query:  What happened to the bag containing a human head that was last seen heading to a police station?