Double Feature: Girl in His Pocket & Final Curtain

 

Girl in His Pocket (aka Amour de poche)
1957
Pierre Kast

Girl in His Pocket drapes a very light science fiction story over a very light romantic comedy. The whole thing is a breezy 77 minutes, but it is harder to escape some of the more sinister implications of the technology presented and how it is used. The technology in question is a chemical when drank, turns someone into a small statue which can only be revived with salt water. This becomes a vehicle for a scientist to carry on a romance with his lab partner without letting his fiancé find out… or at least she doesn’t find out for a little while.

Breaking Baguette

 

The idea of being turned into a tiny immortal statue that can just sit there forever is low key horrifying to me. You are at the mercy of everything. There’s never a mention of what happens to a broken statue, but you could just as easily be lost somewhere with millennia in between until you come in contact with salt water.  Girl in His Pocket is so lightweight as to never address these issues, but I found myself pondering them as the silly romance unfolded.

This is a French production although the version I was watched had a remarkably good English dub. These scenes where the lab assistant is revived contained some mild nudity, but the US version ruthlessly hacks these out, resulting in a garbled end to the first act as it builds to a scene that we never get to see. United States puritanism strikes again.

The science is silly, the romance is silly, this is a weightless yet mildly charming little film. Just don't let me thing about being isolated in a tiny statue for too long or I start to panic.

 Final Curtain
1957
Edward D. Wood Jr.

Final Curtain was a seemingly lost Ed Wood project that was eventually tracked down and restored. Final Curtain served a pitch/pilot episode for what would have an anthology horror show in the vein of Twilight Zone.

The plot (such as it is) is basically an actor walking around and empty theater and having scary thoughts about ghosts or something. That’s literally it. Aside from one other character near the end, it’s just 22 minutes of a guy standing in an empty theater while a narrator tells us how scary it is. 

 

"Say, do you haunt this place often?"

 

Despite its thinness this film is a treasure trove of Ed Wood’s purple prose. We are served an endless stream of dialogue explaining to us how this actor is frightened by the benign looking theater.
This might be one of the best-looking Ed Wood productions I’ve seen. The picture is actually beautiful at times with rich blacks and just the barest hint of moodiness in the lighting. 

Like a lot of early Ed Wood projects, there is something marvelous in seeing him work with what he has available, in this case two actors and an empty building. Its not successful but it takes a certain amount of drive to put together a story on virtually nothing and then have the chutzpah to put it in front of producers in hope of getting a television show. 

Final Curtain in not good but it is Ed Wood to its core.