Some movies experience the theatrical-release equivalent of a still birth yet never seem to stay dead. Such is Night Tide, written and directed by Curtis Harrington and completed for release in 1961, though it didn't get full distribution until 1963. It quickly slipped into obscurity but began to be revived in the 1990s after its star, Dennis Hopper, enjoyed a comeback after wrecking the career he only started to build years after this, his first leading role in a movie. (It's since been issued on DVD with a commentary track featuring both Harrington, who died last year, and Hopper. Last week, a restored 35-mm. print was shown at the Tribeca Film Festival.) Hopper, wearing an Eminem hairdo and a sailor suit that makes him look like part of the male chorus singing behind Fred Astaire and Randolph Scott in Follow the Fleet, plays a sea-farin' man who wanders into a boardwalk carnival reminiscent of the one where Ray Dennis Steckler stopped living and became a mixed-up zombie. There he meets Mora (Linda Lawson), dark-haired beauty whose blank gaze stops the camera cold in the middle of a dolly shot. She's sitting in a beachfront hangout listening to a jazz combo, and Hopper introduces himself by asking if he can join her at her table because, from where he was sitting, he couldn't see the band. She nods yes, and in response, he sits down facing her, with his back to the musicians. It's little things like this that explain why Dennis Hopper's Smooth Moves Guide to Meeting Girls sold so poorly.
Such details as that jazz combo and several long, wordless montage sequences help to stamp Night Tide as an independent American production of the pre-indie scene, studio era. Like such early-'60s oddities as Irving Lerner's Studs Lonigan and Leslie Stevens's Incubus, the 1965 horror film starring William Shatner (and with dialogue written and performed in Esperanto), is a a faintly bohemian-flavored production with one foot in the world of traditional genre movies and one (underfunded) foot in what used to be called "personal" filmmaking. The story involves the possibility that the enticing Mora is a supernatural sea creature--a siren--who "can never have relations with an ordinary human being," though it's not clear what that has to do with her having them with Dennis Hopper. Many people have claimed to find that Night Tide itself exerts a strange, siren's-song pull, though some of us think it's like a Twilight Zone episode stretched three times its natural length and run in slow motion. Without much story or dialogue (or much means of paying for the sound recording if he had more dialogue), Harrington puts a lot of weight on Hopper, who's called on to do a lot of silent emoting--and to do it in the character of an uncomplicated, lovelorn nice guy, not the best look for him. (I mean no disrespect to Admiral Kirk when I say that when it comes to giving the audience something to stare at when not much is going on around him, Hopper, at this stage in his career, was no William Shatner.) Harrington, who had worked in experimental short films back in the 1940s, would go on to direct studio horror films, such as Games and the matched set Who Slew Auntie Roo? and What's the Matter with Helen? as well as a bust career in TV. Whether one finds it exhilarating or soporific, this early cult favorite of his will always retain its fascination as one of the missing links of indie genre moviemaking.