Night Tide, Directed by Curtis Harrington. US 1961, 35mm, b/w, 84 min.
By Nancy Cantwell
I start with the typography of Night Tide, not because it is special in itself or a beautiful execution of script, but, more for its clumsy portentous attempt to sell the melodrama of the action. Acting like a petulant child incapable of not giving away the ending, these titles just spell it out. And lucky for us because the story line of boy meets girl and girl turns out to be mermaid under the spell of the dreaded “Sea People”, probably needs all the help it can get.
The more time I spend with Night Tide, Curtis Harrington’s iconoclast Art Film, the more I find a sincere ardent cinefile hard at work. Shot on the Santa Monica pier (and adjacent Venice neighborhoods), he picks up on the blatant displays of the carny undercurrent without overindulging in the carny turmoil. The neon of the hotel is kept simple, Captain Jack’s card is perfectly generic, as is the Ocean View Calendar. All these props seem to be just lying around in wait, not hand picked as harbingers of horror. I had to include the shot of Johnny, the impossibly young Dennis Hopper in his first leading role, reading the paper with the headline “CAL SNAGS POLIO SHOTS’, just as a reminder of the real “horror”, of the not too distant past polio epidemic, teetering on the edge of extinction.
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