She enacts a series of Freudian shots so blatant they evoke real pity for the character: caressing an ice cube with her lips, stroking a tall candle, applying perfume from a huge bottle with a stopper that looks more like a dildo than some dildos do. Manx’s performance hits a more basic series of notes, and many of them have to do with sex. It’s a classic psycho-and-lackey setup, with Duke using his more innocent comrade to amuse himself. “It’s a broad in a cowboy hat,” comes the reply. Upon arrival at the empty house, Boots walks out of a room and announces: “He’s got a calendar in there.” “What day is it?” asks Duke. Oates, in contrast, plays Boots as an overgrown kid who looks at Ann like she’s a stuffed toy his father has promised to win at the fairground. Allen moves with whispery nastiness, his chief weapon a series of smiles so smug and vicious they border on nauseating.
When Duke pretends to be a landscaper in search of work (“Is this the Hitchcock residence?” he asks, in one of the film’s more obvious jokes), his wide-eyed innocence is belied by the way he keeps subtly invading Ann’s space, inching closer every chance he gets. Late in the movie, as Duke comes closer to seducing Ann, he dances with her to an ersatz “Bolero” (the movie’s score is not its strong point) while they’re framed by a shady bower, as though Eve is tangoing with the Serpent. Allen and Oates are repeatedly shown at windows, slavering at Manx in a way that feels like an assault. After meticulous storyboarding, to cut down on time and expense, it was filmed in and around Stevens’s actual Beverly Hills home, and the outdoor photography, via veteran DP Ted McCord and cameraman Conrad Hall, is suffused with heat and smog. Leslie Stevens worked with Orson Welles at the Mercury Theatre, and he shared his former boss’s taste for elegant but unsettling framing.
Helped by enthusiasm in Europe, the box-office take was still about $2 million, but without studio backing, and forced to screen well outside mainstream distribution, the movie had no place to call home.Īll this may make Private Property sound like a rough-hewn, indifferently shot quickie, but in fact the filmmaking has enormous panache. The film had to be released without a seal, and it was condemned by the Legion of Decency. Duke, a true sociopath who can fake sincerity with frightening ease, insinuates himself into Ann’s trust, and his task is made easier by Ann’s explicit sexual frustration with her career-obsessed (perhaps latently gay) husband Roger, played by Robert Ward.Įven as the ’60s dawned with the promise of smut on the horizon, this kind of thing wasn’t going to fly with the PCA, and it didn’t. The two men follow her home, move into the empty house next door, and spend the vast majority of the film’s running time spying on her, trying to worm their way into her house, her swimming pool, her bed. The aim is to use her to initiate Boots into the world of sex with women he’s probably gay, a fact referred to casually and unmistakably. Shot in 1959, over five days, for just under $60,000, it focuses on how Duke and Boots stalk wealthy, beautiful housewife Ann (played by Kate Manx, the director’s wife). The case of Private Property shows why vanishing acts aren’t just for silent movies. A Blu-ray release is planned for this summer by Cinelicious Pics. It screened last year at UCLA’s annual preservation festival, and TCM’s own Classic Film Festival will screen it next Friday.
The AFI note for the film on Turner Classic Movies’ website states mournfully: “No print of this film could be located.” A few years ago that proved not to be true-elements for this film were rediscovered, exactly where I’ve been unable to divine-and it has been restored by UCLA Film & Television Archive, with funding from the Packard Humanities Institute. Private Property has been unseen for decades. All monsters should come crawling out of nowhere like Duke (Corey Allen) and Boots (Warren Oates), then stroll across the road and extort some orange pop and a pack of Viceroys from the first human they encounter-a gas station attendant who refuses to meet their eyes.įor the modern viewer, the opening has added resonance. Behind them, their beach footprints lead straight into the ocean. Two scruffy drifters climb up a bluff on a stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway in the opening shot of Leslie Stevens’s Private Property.