March Towards October - William Castle (Homicidal)

I included the 2007 user comments on the blog for the Archive but did want to sort of include a few extra thoughts just for the 2020 "diary" I hoped to encapsulate my overall love of the past during 2020, sort of one last real letter to what made me a horror fan. Homicidal (1961)  has a share of dialogue between druggist, Carl (Corbett) and Dr. Jonas (Bunce) about hate, how bottled up could turn someone homicidal, causing them to kill. Couldn't help but think of that since 2020 is chock full of hate. Anyway, I appreciated Castle's "redressing" of "Psycho" (1960), how he incorporated certain characteristics from that film into his without out-and-out ripping it off. His film goes further with "disguising" who you are not, despite yearning to be who you really are, denied that by circumstances put upon you. A father wanted a son. That father even left his first wife to marry another in order to have a son. Supposedly the father has a son, hiring a nurse to make sure he is obedient and does as he is told. That son is set to inherit, seemingly married to the blond murderess who plunged a knife multiple times into a justice-of-peace. The half sister left behind by the father would inherit if the brother wasn't actually male. Castle leaves all kinds of conversation markers to set up the finale. Marshall as both Warren (unrecognizable in fantastic makeup, dyed hair, and suit), the brother of Miriam (Breslin), and Emily (in blond wig, very beautiful, in one of those flowing dresses) is such a find for Castle for the film. When Castle needs Marshall to turn on the "homicidal", especially with her freakish eyes and unhinged facial expression, she does in spades. As Warren, Marshall is quite coldfish and standoffish, but we don't see a lot of "him". That is obviously orchestrated by Castle to keep Marshall's time in that role to a minimum. He is more or less anyway a trick, a con, set up by a father who refused to have another daughter because he needed a son to carry on his name. Emily really is the character Castle cares more about. With Helga, the nurse that took Warren to Denmark, Castle had a fun character that knew the big financial secret but couldn't tell anyone.

Much like "Psycho", there is exposition characters to lay it all out for the viewer. Dr. Jonas is some help in that but unlike poor Arbogast who was a PI murdered by Norman, in "Homicidal" the detective on the hunt for Emily (Gilbert Green) makes it to the end to explain to us just why Warren/Emily needed to kill the justice-of-the-peace and Helga...the secret regarding gender to profit from a will was worth killing for. The fright break at the end, a gimmick that now feels so outdated but for its time was par for the course and expected in Castle films, aside, "Homicidal" I always felt was a clever reworking of "Psycho". I could just see Castle watching Hitchcock's film and taking notes in his head on how he could take that premise and twist and use it for something of his own. I think if you are to be inspired by a masterpiece, "Homicidal" is as good an example as any to how to do it.