My Interview (from 2005) with Link (1986) Director Richard Franklin

In 2005, while I was writing Horror Films of the 1980s for McFarland, I had the opportunity and honor to interview late director Richard Franklin (1948 – 2007) about the film I reviewed on the blog today, Link (1986).  

Mr. Franklin was very generous with his time, and this interview occurred on November 20, 2005.

Some -- though not all -- of this material, appeared in the published book, but I thought it would be nice, today, to share the back-and-forth as it appeared originally, only cleaned up for purposes of clarity

The topic moves from Link to horror movies of the eighties in general.

Muir: Describe the genesis of Link.

Richard Franklin: My landlord (DP Tom Ackerman) on a spec trip in 1979 showed me the story and I optioned it. It was to have been my next film after Road Games.

Muir: What was it about this material that stimulated you as a filmmaker?

Richard Franklin: The opening line in the synopsis: “Someone pulled the head off of Mrs. Murphy’s cat.” The idea that an animal could be acting like a man acting like an animal. An ironic spin on Michael Myers and the whole genre. Then learning from Jane Goodall that there was some truth to this [idea].

Muir: Phillip gives Jane a set of rules to obey. Was part of the fun of this film giving viewers these rules and then having characters break them?

Richard Franklin: Shades of Gremlins (1984)!

Muir: Was there a long period of rehearsal on this film to get the actors and crew familiar with working with apes?

Richard Franklin: No. We left the apes to Ray Berwick (who did The Birds [1963]).

Muir: How long was the shoot?

Richard Franklin: Quite long. Fifty-four days.

Muir: How did Link and the other apes take direction?

Richard Franklin: They could do short (15 – 20 second) behaviors. And didn’t argue. But [they] lost interest quickly.

Muir: Were there delays?

Richard Franklin: It was a grindingly difficult shoot. But not because of the apes. I found the English crew very slow and difficult.

Muir: How did Elisabeth Shue do with her ape co-stars?

Richard Franklin: I believe she loved them.

Muir: The final chase in the movie is electrifying. How long did it take to stage and execute?

Richard Franklin: You mean the siege in the house? Maybe a week. And thank you. No one’s ever said that before.

Muir: Had you storyboarded it all out?

Richard Franklin: Yes. Without that we’d have been lost.  Link has something like three times the number of shots of any of my other movies.

Muir: I notice there are many long shots there. Your fluid camera and choice of shots make it clear where everyone is in relationship to each other.

Richard Franklin. Absolutely! And thanks for noticing. Maybe I’m a neo-classicist.

Muir: What do you think the film ultimately says about man/ape relationships?

Richard Franklin: That we are alike – and different. That civilization (political correctness and the like) is a thin veneer. Yet that 1% genetic difference makes a HUGE difference.

Muir: What happened regarding the release of the film?

Richard Franklin: EMI went belly up. Cannon inherited the film and those guys were absolute bozos.

Muir: I didn’t find it until a home video release, and I suspect the film wasn’t released theatrically in the States.

Richard Franklin: It had a small theatrical airing.

Muir: What was the problem, if you recall? Why did this film get lost and is it still lost, in a sense?

Richard Franklin: Inept distribution. It happens a lot – particularly to me. Look at Visitors (2003).

Muir: What do you think a student of films should understand about your sensibilities as a filmmaker?

Richard Franklin: I’m a neo-classicist. [I] believe traditional mise-en-scene can’t be beaten. [I] hate “wobbly-cam” (aping home videos) as it draws attention to itself and gets in the way of emotion (cf John Ford’s idea of “invisible technique,” which you’ll see more of in my later work like Hotel Sorrento/Sorrento Beach [1995].)

Muir: Do you think young directors working today still understand film grammar and how to use it?

Richard Franklin: Somewhat.

Muir: Which of your films in the 1980s best express your viewpoint as a filmmaker?

Richard Franklin: Psycho II (1983) is the best anyway.

Muir: If you had to choose one to film to show a class, which one would it be?

Richard Franklin: I just showed the new [Psycho II] DVD to a class.

Muir: What do you think of the trend of slasher films in the 1980s? Was it good for horror, or do you think it was a blind alley?

Richard Franklin: Maybe good for horror, but not necessarily “the thriller.” This genre once included North by Northwest (1959), but psychological suspense like Gaslight (1944) or The Cat and the Canary (1939) has sort of disappeared in favour of grue.  To me, the best screen murder ever is Nancy’s in Lean’s Oliver Twist (1948), and the scariest scene ever is the Indian raid in The Searchers (1956).

Muir: Do you have any favorite horror films from the decade?

Richard Franklin: Any suggestions? I like Halloween (1978), but that was the seventies.

Muir: What are about Dressed to Kill (1980)?

Richard Franklin: Brian is drawn to different values in Hitchcock’s work from those that attract me.

Muir: The Shining (1980)?

Richard Franklin: Some fantastic moments, but a bit labored. Kubrick (late in his career) underestimated his audience.

Muir: The Fly? (1986)

Richard Franklin: Fun, in a light way.

(At this point, my questions were all answered.)

Muir: Thanks again for your time!”

Richard Franklin: Hope my ideas do not cause offence. By all means come back for more…”

Cult-Movie Review: Link (1986)

Although relegated to limited theatrical release and near obscurity afterwards, director Richard Franklin’s Link (1986) is an effectively made and ingenious horror film that deserves to be better-remembered and, indeed, championed. 

The film depicts a tense battle for superiority, pitting man (or woman…) against ape in a remote English estate.  A sort of simian version of Psycho (1960), Link ponders a very specific question:  Does possessing “civilization” make man inherently superior to apes?

Or, contrarily, is civilization a mere construct that can be picked up or put down as easily as one takes off a dinner jacket? 

Is civilization a strength, or a weakness?

Throughout the Franklin film, when the titular chimp (played by an orangutan…) prepares to commit murder, he removes his tasteful jacket, as though noting that, simply, civilization has its limitations, and therefore, at times, must be ignored.

Link the ape wears civilization as if is a suit, but does not internalize its value.

Cleverly, Link presents three important “rules” that -- according to Terence Stamp’s anthropologist, Dr. Phillips -- must dominate man’s interaction with chimpanzees.  But then the film diagrams, in harrowing detail, what problems those rules can cause for both man and beast. 

After all, rules or laws are part and parcel of “civilization.” And yet by the same token rules, to some degree, establish boundaries that demand testing. Link tests those boundaries in his human “friends” and masters, and possesses a tactical advantage in the sense that he can avoid civilization all together simply by taking off the aforementioned jacket.

Humans, it seems, have a much more difficult time shedding this construct.

Buttressed by a superb final act which features a climax (and chase) of virtually unbearable suspense, Link explores man’s perpetual fascination or obsession with simians, and at the same time notes that civilization is both man’s greatest handicap and greatest virtue.

“The little monster’s been getting out at night…”

A zoology student in London named Jane (Elisabeth Shue) petitions Professor Phillips (Stamp), a prominent anthropologist, to serve as his assistant. With a semester break coming up, Phillips agrees that Jane can work at his remote estate, on the sea, as his assistant. 

There -- over the objections of her boyfriend, David -- she will prepare his meals, clean the house, and help him look after his chimps, including old Voodoo, baby Imp, and the intelligent “domestic,” Link.

Upon her arrival at the house in the country, Jane is unprepared for Phillips’ hostility and cruelty towards the animals. He plans to euthanize both Voodoo and Link, and tells Jane the hard and fast rules for dealing with the apes. 

However, Link soon turns the tables on Professor Phillips.

While Jane attempts to understand, precisely, the simian politics of the house, Link goes on a killing spree, and lays siege to the house and its occupants.

“You just have to let them know that they are forgiven…”

Writer Everett De Roche, Richard Franklin’s frequent creative collaborator, sets down three rules for man/ape interaction in Link. 

These are:

1. Man is the dominant species, so he must never treat the apes as equals.

2. Man’s anger must never escalate. He must always forgive the apes, no matter what they do. The apes must know that they are forgiven.

And, finally…

3 Man must not get involved in inter-ape squabbles, instead letting them work matters out for themselves.

Notice that, in a curious way, all three rules establish the same thing: man is in charge, and ape is subservient, inferior.

Rule one establishes dominance, but so does rule two, in more nuanced terms, because it is man who has the capacity (and responsibility) to forgive, not the apes.

The third rule, meanwhile, establishes that ape matters are beneath the interest of man and therefore to be ignored. Their affairs are not man’s concern.

Phillip’s Laws as we might call them overrule the law of the jungle, and demand that man act, constantly, as a deliberate superior to his ape friends. 

Amazingly, clever Link develops a way around these rules. He kills Voodoo (settling a squabble his own way), and is constantly seen demanding forgiveness, no matter how radically he transgresses, or what crimes he commits. 

If humans must always forgive, then Link can always simply extend his hand in supplication, no matter his trespass. Link realizes he has an out for any act that could get him in trouble: Rule #2.  He doesn’t realize that Dr. Phillip can break his own rule by offering not forgiveness, but a final solution: murder of the transgressor.

Yet if Link sees a way around the rules, he is not exactly deceitful in nature. By contrast, Phillips’ stock and trade is cruelty, and he plans to kill Link essentially because the animal has grown too smart; too knowing.

At least Link has the decency to remove his jacket when he gets down to murder, an affectation that Phillips doesn’t observe. He never casts off the face of civilization, though his act (homicide) qualifies as barbaric.

But Link is a clever movie, in part, because it establishes a film-long conflict between man and ape on all fronts. One early scene sees Jane pitted against Imp in an IQ test, and she nearly loses. The message is that intelligence is not the sole purview of man.  Intelligence is not the thing that separates us, then, and Link’s dialogue informs us that some apes have IQs as high as 85.

Another scene suggests that man is separated from ape by his capacity to make war. The movie undercuts that notion as well, and tells a story of a chimp “war” in Tanzania in 1979.

In the finale, Jane realizes that the only way to defeat Link is to trick him, and she does so by exploiting his understanding of Phillip’s Laws…of civilization itself. Link knows that he will be forgiven for his trespasses, including smoking. 

So Jane starts to discipline him, pre-emptively, for smoking a cigar near a lit gas pilot light in the kitchen.  Knowing he won’t face permanent anger or discipline, Link lights up the cigar, demonstrating his belief in his own superiority. 

Instead, he blows up the house and loses the war.

Watching Link again for the first time since 2005, I was struck by how similar the film is, in a sense, to Hitchcock’s Psycho. 

The setting is an isolated house with a very similar interior on the first floor, and the murderous individual (in this case Link, not Norman Bates) has an established routine for disposing of visitors (dumping cars not in a swamp, but over a rocky cliff, Oceanside). 

Furthermore, the villain is psychotic, one might surmise, due to a betrayal from a parental figure. Norman poisoned and killed his own Mother when she turned her affection away from him.  Link kills his father when he recognizes Phillip’s betrayal.  There’s even a bathroom scene here, with Link peeping at Jane as she is about to take a bath.

Link is more straightforward a film than Psycho is, in many respects, but both films trade on the notion that not everything is what it seems on the surface.  Phillips boasts a darkness to him that seems to bring about Link’s violent fit, and so a key question remains: is Link acting out of self-defense, or out of blood-thirstiness when he commits murder?  Norman’s activities, likewise, come out of the need and desire to emotionally protect himself from his mother’s death.  His murders are a form of mental self-defense, you might say.

One innocent figure in Link is the baby chimp, Imp. He is carried about on Shue’s shoulders throughout the film.  She reads him bedtime stories, and he is treated, essentially, like a human baby.  

This innocent is unencumbered by rules or knowledge of them, and suggests a blunt course of action.  “Kill Link,” Imp types into a computer. 

Jane responds that murder is “is not the way civilized people behave,” but ultimately, Imp is right.  Imp suggests the same course of action as Dr. Phillips does, but Imp gains audience sympathy because of his innocence, and because of his nature as an animal…one who understands instinctively what Link is capable of. Link, who has figured out how to game the rules, must die, because he keeps crossing lines of decorum or civilized behavior (murder, primarily).

Link is a great horror film, dominated by a number of great, almost sub-textual touches.  Early on, the film Blonde Venus (1932) is seen on a television, and shows footage of humans dancing with a gorilla (or a person in a gorilla suit).  Underneath the suit, Marlene Dietrich is revealed at one point.  So Dietrich removes her “costume” as a beast to reveal her civilized, human self.  This act is the precise opposite of Link’s in the film. He takes off his human suit to reveal his murderous, uncivilized, animal side.

Similarly, the lead character here is named “Jane,” and we associate that name explicitly with Jane in the Tarzan stories, and Jane Goodall, a famous primatologist and anthropologist.  In all these cases, Jane is a figure who is something of a go-between, moving between the human world and the ape world.  That is, not coincidentally, the role that Shue’s Jane plays here.

Finally, I love that Jane reads Imp the story of The Three Little Pigs in the film, because the last act literalizes the story, with Link as the Big Bad Wolf outside, trying very hard to make his way inside the house. 

A formalist like Hitchcock, Franklin surpasses his earlier film work in Link by staging some remarkable and expressive shots during the movie’s final battle. After Jane picks up a shot-gun and shoots at Link, Franklin stages a gorgeous shot through the bullet hole in the kitchen door. 

Later, he stages an extreme high-angle shot from above the second floor balcony, and follows Link’s pursuit of Jane, Imp and David up the stairs, around the ledge, and into a locked room.  The effect is exhilarating, as the long-shot provides viewers the full terrain of the battle, and offers no fakery or trickery.  A sense of space and time -- and therefore danger -- is brilliantly preserved. While so many films sort of wind-down or creatively peter out in the third act (see: Explorers [1985]), Link delivers the thrills.

For some reason, audiences got a lot of “ape”-based horror movies in the late 1980s and early 1990s, including Link, Monkey Shines (1988), and Shakma (1990).  

I’m a big fan of Romero’s Monkey Shines, but even so Link remains, in my eyes, top banana.

(Note: I will post an old interview [from 2005] that I conducted with Richard Franklin about the film, later today, on the blog.)

Movie Trailer: Link (1986)

Cult-Movie Review: Road Games (1981)

“…Duel [1972] had already been made. I was just struck by how much like a Panavision movie screen a truck window looked, and how the driver looked out and down at the world. Rear Window [1954]) again.”

-Director Richard Franklin, describing the genesis of his thriller, Road Games (1981), in my book, Horror Films of the 1980s (2007)

Last week I wrote here about director Richard Franklin’s career in the genre, and his first horror hit, Patrick (1978). 

This week I want to turn your attention to an even more accomplished film from the auteur, and one championed by Quentin Tarantino himself: Road Games (1981).

Written by Everett De Roche, this film stars Stacy Keach as a clever trucker named Quid, and Jamie Lee Curtis as a hitchhiker, called “Hitch” (after the master of suspense). Together, this unusual duo puzzles through a series of brutal murders in rural Australia, all from the cab of a truck that is carrying slabs of meat through the country-side.

Although Road Games is often lumped in with the slasher film craze of the same era because of Curtis’s presence in a leading role and the violent nature of the Jack the Ripper-like killer, the film actually harks back to an earlier film tradition: The Hitchcockian thriller. 

As Franklin notes above, Rear Window is absolutely the model here, but the film actually adds new elements to the Master’s equation too. Keach’s window on the world -- the truck windshield -- is always seeing things in motion, always traveling.  That makes it quite unlike Jimmy Stewart’s (stationary) apartment window, and this factor adds a sense of velocity and unpredictability to Road Games.  You are never quite sure what is going to happen next. Around each corner is a surprise, and often a shock.

In fact, Road Games cleverly adds a number of new twists to the familiar formula, including the fact that Keach’s character is suffering from a physical condition of a sort too (again like Stewart’s character).  Only Quid suffers from physical exhaustion and sleep deprivation rather than a broken leg.  He is therefore in the position of questioning reality itself – and his own perception -- and that element too adds a strong sense of the unpredictable.

Bolstered by at least one stellar action scene set on the road that involves a truck, a car, a boat and a boat’s anchor, Road Games remains a taut, well-orchestrated horror movie. The effort showcases, again, Franklin’s gallows sense of humor, precise, clean direction, and playful sense of gamesmanship.  The film’s surprises, including a last minute sting-in-the-tail/tale, continue to impress, and the score by Brian May is terrific.

In short, this is one of those films from the early 1980s that has held up well, and one can point to Franklin’s sort of neo-classic approach to the material as a reason why.

“Maybe this is some new kind of game.”

An exhausted truck driver named Quid (Keach) is assigned an emergency job by his dispatcher, “pushing piggies to Perth,” or rather, transporting cargo (meat) during a nationwide strike.

But as he prepares to rest for a short night before a long day of driving, Quid spies a suspicious man go into a hotel with a beautiful hitchhiker.  Early in the morning, the man leaves the premises in a green and black van, but there is no sign of the woman…only a cooler which may contain her severed head.

Quid believes the driver to be the Jack the Ripper-styled murderer “butchering” young women in the area, but has trouble convincing the local police of his theory. Instead, they think Quid may be the killer. 

Soon, Quid and his pet dingo, Bosworth, pick up a hitchhiker, Pamela (Curtis), and the two go back and forth debating about the killer and his nature, a discussion which both passes the time and proves terrifying in its implications..

At a rest-stop, the duo runs across the green van, parked and apparently abandoned. Pamela goes inside to investigate, and to discover what dark secret resides in the cooler. 

Instead, she is captured by the killer, who drives off in a hurry. Quid gives chase in his truck, but by now, most of Australia believes he is the wanted murderer…

“Aren’t you a little old to be picking me up?”

In Rear Window, Jimmy Stewart played a photographer with a broken leg, a man with a good “eye” who was bored, and then took to watching his neighbors in a nearby apartment building to alleviate that ennui. 

Road Games instead takes an exhausted truck driver, Quid -- a guy who is too smart and too educated for this particular job -- who passes the time trying to entertain himself, quoting poetry and generally over-thinking everything.

“I haven’t slept since Wednesday,” he tells his dispatcher, adding that he is “hallucinating.”  Thus the audience is faced with the distinct possibility of an unreliable protagonist, one who is smart and imaginative, but also pushed beyond the point of fatigue. Has Quid’s imagination gotten the better of him?  Is he seeing things and making connections that aren’t really there?

Road Games also adds motion – near-constant, driving motion -- to the Rear Window gestalt, because it is set on the road, in a truck and the scenery is constantly changing.  Thus, viewers may think of travel terms like “highway hypnosis” as they apply to Quid.  Sometimes, it just seems like he’s trying to stay awake, grasping at straws. The always-moving nature of the film also manages to make Quid and Pamela feel isolated.  Help is never around when they need it, and that damned green van is always nearby.

Another travel term, made popular long after the movie’s release, similarly comes to mind: road rage. 

In one of the film’s most brilliantly-executed action sequences, a car driver pulling a boat behind his vehicle decides that he doesn’t want Quid to pass….and acts accordingly.  Quid, who is pursuing the killer in the green van, can’t back off or risk losing his quarry, but must get around the enraged driver and the results are catastrophic for one of them.  Before the scene is over, the boat is pulped.  In all, this sustained sequence in Road Games is so well-designed, shot and edited that it brings to mind another popular Australian film of the age: The Road Warrior (1982).

The leitmotif underlining Road Games is not surprisingly, game-playing. Quid plays games to stay awake and occupy his superior mind.  The killer plays a game too, trying to evade capture and frame Quid for his terrible acts.  But throughout the film, we see characters playing I-Spy, and so forth.  The aforementioned road rage scene might even be called a game of “cat and mouse,” with the cat crushing the unlucky mouse. And when Hitch (Pamela) and Quid discuss the killer’s motivations -- psycho-sexual or not -- they are also playing a game, and engaging in some fun banter at the same time.

The film’s tension and energy, however, arises not from the games that are played by the characters, but the questions (or puzzles) Franklin and De Roche throw out.  What is in that ubiquitous cooler? Why does Quid’s truck, carrying the meat slabs, weigh too much (by precisely the weight of a human corpse?) Where is the killer hiding, if he isn’t inside the men’s room at the rest stop?

In my review of Patrick, I noted how Franklin plays, visually-speaking, with words, literally.  There, the words “emergency entrance” on a hospital sign became “emergency trance,” for instance. Similarly, Road Games shows viewers such terms As “Universal Meats” and “Tomorrow’s Bacon,” and they are rife with double meaning. 

For example, if both human and animal carcasses are on that truck – and therefore indistinguishable -- then it is carrying “universal meats” in a sense.  And if the human body gets delivered to market with the pork, then it too is “tomorrow’s bacon” in a really creepy, nasty way.

Franklin manages to incorporate this sense of gallows humor without adding any unnecessary moments or wrong turns.  The film feels clean and spare, and totally committed to its purpose of subverting expectations, surprising the audience, and generating unbearable suspense.  By the same token, the film’s protagonists are delightful, and it is a pleasure spending time with them, and listening to their intelligent (if sometimes speculative) banter.

Although “the opening weekend was a disappointment,” Franklin told me, for Horror Films of the 1980s, appreciation for Road Games soon grew.  “It was only when it got on TV that it really took off.” (page 276). 

From there, it was a short climb to “cult movie” status for Road Games, a film that absolutely deserves an immediate blu-ray release.  

Movie Trailer: Road Games (1981)

Cult-Movie Review: Patrick (1978)

Richard Franklin (1948 – 2007) is a talent that more horror film fans ought to remember and celebrate. A protégé of Alfred Hitchcock, Franklin created a number of memorable genre movies in the late 1970s and early 1980s including Road Games (1981) starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Psycho II (1983), the vastly-underrated Link (1986) and the subject of this review: Patrick (1978).

Like contemporaries De Palma and Carpenter, Franklin had a very distinctive film style. His films featured elaborate, expressive compositions of near technical perfection, and because of his understanding of film grammar (film as a medium for visual symbolism) many of Franklin’s cinematic works are unparalleled in terms of their suspense. 

Naturally, Hollywood didn’t treat Franklin particularly well, and he returned home to his native Australia in the early 1990s.  I had the good fortune to interview him for my book Horror Films of the 1980s (2007), wherein we discussed various aspects of his work in the Reagan Decade. Today, I recall him as a decent, well-spoken man who was generous with his time and open about every aspect of his career.

Patrick (1978) is not, perhaps, Franklin’s most accomplished or consistent work or art, though it remains intriguing in terms of its layered approach to the material. The film was something of a phenomenon in the late 1980s (in the post-Carrie [1976] aftermath) and was the movie that put Franklin on the map. Patrick was also remade this year as Patrick: Evil Awakens (2014), which I’ll review here tomorrow.

Although Patrick could use some judicious editing (to get it down to around 95 minutes or so) -- especially in its third act -- the film is considered a classic by many primarily because of Franklin’s slow-burn approach.

The movie features a comatose patient, Patrick, as its antagonist. This bug-eyed juggernaut never moves from his hospital bed and never even blinks, and yet is on-screen and present throughout the picture.  The film features at least two jump scares of epic proportions when, at long last, Patrick appears to break out of his standard paralysis. 

One such scare is pure simplicity. Patrick ever-so-slowly turns his head to face a nurse who has gone to open the window by his bed.  The slow-turn of his head, and the expression on his face as he does so are more than enough to make the skin crawl.

On a re-watch, I found other aspects of the film even more notable than I had remembered. Everett De Roche’s script is unfailingly intelligent, and literate too.  And Franklin’s wicked sense of humor is played out in terms of imagery, with certain sign posts forecasting danger. 

More trenchantly, Patrick appears to be a story about what it means to be a single, professional woman trying to make it alone in the 1970s. Susan Penhaligon plays the likable lead character, Nurse Kathy Jacquard, a woman who must navigate patriarchal expectations at every turn, whether from her employer, a mad scientist (Robert Helpmann), her stalker-ish husband Ed (Rod Mullinar), from whom she is separated, or the doctor, Brian (Bruce Barry) who wants so desperately to bed her.  

Given the aggressive behavior of all these men and her so-called “unstable domestic situation,” it seems natural, perhaps, that Kathy gravitates towards Patrick, a comatose patient who doesn’t demand, only rebuffs…at least at first.

Kathy -- a character termed “frigid” by her husband -- must negotiate the modern world alone (a new home, a new job, and a new social designation as single). Yet every man in her life seems to demand an “electric” connection with her. Patrick is all the more insidious, because he doesn’t encroach on her space, he invites her, essentially, into his own dark, malevolent world.

Patrick artfully touches on many good ideas, including the inhumanity of modern science, but the film is most successful if one considers it a chronicle of Kathy’s personal journey as she contends with a boogeyman whom the dialogue deliberately describes as a “creature from the Id.”

“Medicine can prolong death much more effectively than it can prolong life.”

A recently separated woman, Kathy Jacquard (Susan Penhaligan) moves to her own apartment, away from her estranged husband, Ed (Mullinar), and seeks employment at the private hospital for comatose patients, the Roget Clinic.

After an interview with the stern Matron Cassidy (Julia Blake), Kathy is hired and immediately taken to her new ward, the patient in Room 15: Patrick (Robert Thompson). 

Patrick, a young man (and murderer), has been comatose for three years, and shows no signs of interface with the outside world. Sometimes, however, he spits when nurses approach him, but Dr. Roget (Helpmann) dismisses this behavior as a mere reflex action. Using a dead frog as an example, Roget describes for Kathy how electrical impulses can travel through a body -- even appearing to animate it -- when life and consciousness are gone.

Kathy is intrigued by Patrick, and begins to show him a kindness not matched by the facility at the institute.

When Ed burns his hands mysteriously, however, and Brian -- an on-the-make doctor -- nearly drowns, Kathy begins to suspect that Patrick is somehow leaving his body and terrorizing the men in her life.

“How is our creature from the Id this morning?”

A recurring motif in Richard Franklin’s Patrick is electricity. 

In the film’s “crime in the past” prologue, the audience sees Patrick toss an electric heater into a bath-tub where his mother and her lover are canoodling. This is the first example of electricity being related to passion, and murder.

After the opening credits, and before we first see Kathy enter the Roget Clinic, we are treated to a close-up of electric sparks emanating from a moving cable car. This might be interpreted as indicator that the terror exemplified by Patrick is about to return, and enter Kathy’s life, specifically.

A neon entrance signs sparks as well (changing the word “entrance” to “trance,” importantly), and when Patrick attacks Brian in his swimming pool, the pool lights malfunction too. The film even opens with the sound effects of electrical sparking (against a black screen), and Matron Cassidy is electrocuted in the film’s last act.

The implication, on a literal level, is that Patrick is able to move his consciousness beyond the confines of his useless physical body via electrical impulses. 

On a more metaphorical level, the leitmotif of electricity, or “sparks” seems crucial to Kathy’s story, and her sense of ennui with her life.  She has been designated by that terrible word “frigid,” and both Brian and Ed assiduously pursue her, hoping to spark some kind of romantic or sexual activity in return. She largely resists these efforts, not because she is a cold fish (a male term for her condition), one feels, but because neither man seems interested in her on anything beyond a surface of physical level. She is clearly unhappy in her marriage, and seeks happiness and fulfillment outside it, in the professional realm, at the Roget Institute.

Ironically, Kathy is immediately drawn there to a man who cannot impose his physical wishes upon her, or even make the first move.  In fact, any attempt to be intimate with Patrick is rebuffed instantly by his reflexive spitting. 

But Kathy breaks down that wall, that barrier, and is able to show Patrick the kind of physical attention that she can’t apparently, show Ed. She brings Patrick back to life by touching him, all over his body, and asking him if he can “feel” it.  For once, she is in the driver’s seat, she is the one leading the dance, so-to-speak.

Whereas the aggressive, bordering-on-inappropriate attention of Ed only pushes Kathy further away, Patrick’s inability to relate or perform at all draws her closer, and brings her into his world. Where Ed stupidly attempts to force Kathy into sexual intercourse she doesn’t want (“so much for a woman’s rape fantasies,” he insensitively quips…), Patrick cannot, apparently, make any advances whatsoever. Dr. Roget even describes him in physically and sexually unthreatening terms, calling Patrick “160 pounds of limp flesh.”  The word limp has a pretty obvious connotation in terms of sexuality.

Finally, of course, Kathy realizes that this isn’t precisely so, that Patrick is ultimately no different than either Ed or Brian, and that he too makes aggressive demands on her.  The film’s most infamous line, perhaps, is “Patrick wants his hand job,” a statement that again forces an overt sexual demand upon Kathy that she finds uncomfortable.  The film’s last act sees Kathy, rather than being acted upon, taking dynamic action to end Patrick’s influence. But in a sense, she also rescues Ed and Brian, a turnaround of the relationship status quo that empowers her.

Intriguingly, Matron Cassidy, though emotionally distant, is also a strong female character. For a long stretch of the film she acts only according to Dr. Roget’s bizarre and draconian wishes and orders, but finally -- reckoning with her own morality – she takes a stand to end Patrick’s so-called “life.”  Patrick kills her before she can turn the power off on him, but in terms of the character, Cassidy undergoes the same sort of journey towards independence that we see in Kathy. She ultimately finds the confidence to live according to her own moral code, and not by the edicts of the domineering man in her life. She sees Patrick’s life as a cruel one that should not be prolonged, and she no longer ignores her own voice.

Above, I noted director Franklin’s sense of humor, and many visuals in the film humorously spell out warnings or codes to the characters.  Early on, when Kathy first visits the hospital, for instance, she walks across a painted warning on the street: Do Not Enter.   She crosses that threshold blindly, and the horror in her life commences.  But she literally ignores a giant sign, under her feet, warning her to consider her path.

Later, the sign at the Roget Clinic which reads “Emergency Entrance” shorts out and comes to read “Emergency Trance.” 

The pertinent question here is, whose trance is the sign referring to?  Is Patrick in a trance, in his comatose state? 

Perhaps so, but the overall structure of the film suggests that Kathy has lived her adult life in a trance as well, and that only by breaking out of it (as Patrick breaks out of his, leaping out of his bed…) can she find happiness, or at least satisfaction.

Patrick’s sub-plot about irresponsible science and its prolongation of death, not life, raises some interesting questions vis-à-vis Kathy as well. She and Dr. Roget discuss, at length, the point of death, the point at which the soul or life-force leave the body. Roget also -- using that frog demonstration -- suggests that a soul may have nothing whatsoever to do with the appearance of life. He report that a simple burst of electricity mimics the appearance of true life.  Kathy, who has struck out on her own, suffers from an amorphous, existential problem in the film. She is not satisfied in marriage, or her life in general. Like that frog (or by extension, Patrick), she has the appearance of a real life, but it is just a show, a façade.

There’s a school of thought regarding John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) that Laurie Strode and Michael Myers are psychologically connected. He is, some say, a manifestation of her Id, or her “hang-ups” to use a seventies colloquialism. Patrick rather directly forges a similar dynamic. Kathy and Patrick are both stuck in a trance, both not really living, both trying to find the spark that can make existence meaningful.  Both find asymmetric ways to assert independence and power.

Halloween is a better horror film, for certain, but Patrick is smart, well-rendered, and wholly deserving of its reputation as a kind of mini-classic. As I noted above, the film loses steam some in the third act, and could do with some trimming, but the clever screenplay, the great central performance by Penhaligon and Franklin’s crisp, knowing, technically-adroit direction all make the film worth a re-evaluation.

Tomorrow, I look at the 2014 remake.