As I spent more and more time with Night Tide I began to have dejavu and a longing to feast on the films of Frederico Fellini. Curtis Harrington is no poseur. On the contrary, he was an early protégé of Maya Deren and a close friend of Kenneth Anger and Gregory Markopoulos. Night Tide is his psychological feature debut and uses many persuasive devices to deliver a surreal atmosphere that had not yet been seen. Felllini’s 81/2 does not get released for another two years. The Santa Monica pier and canals of Venice are used extensively to provide dislocated and dreamlike locals. There is the pursuit of the illusive “She Siren” that lures our leading lady back to the sea. There are even hipster nightclub entrees that reflect posturing found in La Dolce Vita. But severe budget restrictions along with a heavy hand ultimately lead Harrington down the path of the horror genre. He goes on to work with Hopper again in Queen of Blood and then with Debbie Reynolds and Shelley Winters in “What’s a Matter with Helen”.

Meanwhile across the seas, Frederico Fellini emerges out of Italian neorealism and turns to embrace the writings of Carl Jung. The resulting string of oneiric film created include  8½ (1963), Juliet of the Spirits (1965), Satyricon (1969), Roma (1972),  Amarcord (1973), Casanova (1976), and City of Women (1980). Yum.

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Part of me just cannot deal with anything Mora, unconvincingly played by Linda Lawson. Maybe it’s because she is a mermaid, but mostly because she is just over the top for no good reason. She really belongs on some distant planet with James T. Kirk, romping around on fake bolders with phasers set to vaporize…not scuba diving with Dennis Hopper off the Santa Monica pier.

As a Siren I would say her powers of persuasion lack depth, but here when asked to to star in a beatnik beach bongo expressionistic dance to angst, I’d say she does a damn fine job!

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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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