Dennis Hopper in Night Tide (1960)
Director Curtis Harrington's Atmospheric Supernatural Thriller
Night Tide is a dream-like delight, a layered fantasy in which an Everyman pursues a mysterious beauty and is drawn into both her worlds – one mundane, the other surreal and sometimes terrifying.
It’s one of those unforgettable low-budget art house films completely of its time, in this case the early sixties, when film schools began churning out a new generation of filmmakers who would dominate American movies from the 1970s onward.
Dennis Hopper's Johnny Drake meets Linda Lawson's Mora
Dennis Hopper had broken into movies in the James Dean classics Rebel Without a Cause and Giant. But afterward, Hopper subsisted mostly on television guest shots until 1960, when, in preparing his first feature, experimental filmmaker Curtis Harrington cast him as lonely sailor Johnny Drake in Night Tide.
One night on leave, Johnny wanders into a jazz club on the Santa Monica Pier. There, he spots Mora, an enigmatic beauty played by TV actress Linda Lawson.
Johnny follows Mora out of the club and ingratiates himself.
We quickly learn the shy Mora works as a “mermaid” at a pier attraction – she poses in a fishtail suit in a fake underwater tank.
As he courts Mora, Johnny slowly learns the source of her skittishness: she genuinely believes she is a mermaid pursued by the “Sea People,” who want to return her to the depths, where she belongs.
Night Tide features Gavin Muir and Easy Rider's Luana Anders
Most guys would run like the wind. But not Hopper’s Johnny Drake. After all, maybe she’s nuts… but she’s gorgeous. And of course, the subtext is that he wants to save her from madness.
However, things get progressively stranger, until a sublime moment when the frantic Johnny can no longer be sure Mora isn’t a mermaid – maybe even one of murderous intent.
The film is an atmospheric mix of noir, the carny life and the supernatural. Director Harrington’s experimental roots really show in nightmarish scenes which question Johnny’s own sanity.
Night Tide also features a hammy performance by Gavin Muir as Mora’s father-figure, and nice, quiet work by Luana Anders, who might as well be called The Sweet and Shy But Determined Other Girl Who Wants Johnny For Herself. (Nine years later, Anders played a featured role in Hopper’s Easy Rider.)
David Raksin scores Night Tide
The film is a virtual time-capsule of life in the seedier environs of Santa Monica and Venice, California. Just two years earlier, Orson Welles shot Touch of Evil a few blocks away – a fact that underscores how perfectly suited this decaying urban environment was to the film’s noir aspirations.
The director called on friend David Raksin – best known for his haunting theme in Laura – to compose the Night Tide score. Raksin’s work here is simple, appropriate and effective – from the sweetly innocent opening theme through the dramatic flourishes later on when the film teeters toward horror.
Night Tide is not a great film. The plot, based on Harrington’s own Poe-influenced short story, is creaky, and the leads’ performances often stiff and distancing. But there’s both an edgy sensibility and dolorous poetry in the black-and-white cinematography of Vilis Lapenieks and the uncredited Floyd Crosby.
Curtis Harrington went on to make notable horror films including What’s the Matter With Helen? And of course, Hopper was nine years away from directing Easy Rider, the counterculture manifesto.
But for a window into the mindset of a new generation of risk-taking filmmakers entering the New Frontier, Night Tide is hard to beat.
