NOT Available on DVD: ‘Two on a Guillotine’

The guillotine was a device developed during the French Revolution and was used in carrying out thousands of executions. It consisted of an upright frame from which a sharp blade is suspended. The blade is raised with a rope and then allowed to drop, quickly severing the victim’s head from their body. In 1964, the Aurora plastics company, famous for their series of best-selling monster model kits, produced a 1/12th scale model of an actual working guillotine complete with a little victim whose head could be lopped off with the flick of a switch. Though tame compared with some items in popular culture today, parents groups at the time complained that it was warping the young minds of future baby boomers but the toy was cool and proved to be a hit. Warner Brothers studios jumped on the brief ‘Guillotine Craze’ bandwagon the next year with the juvenile horror film TWO ON A GUILLOTINE, a fun and scary movie that made an indelible impression on me as a child when it ran on TV but is NOT available on DVD.

TWO ON A GUILLOTINE concerns the Great “Dukeâ€� Duquesne (Caesar Romero), an old-fashioned stage magician, his wife/assistant Melinda (Connie Stevens) and their daughter Cassie (played as an adult by Ms Stevens as well). Much of his act seems to be comprised of bloody staged murders of his wife and he soon introduces his new trick, an illusion where he cuts her head off on stage using a large guillotine. What could go wrong? The Duke loses his mind and is sent to an asylum while the couple’s daughter Cassie goes to live with an aunt. Twenty years pass and the adult Cassie receives word that her father has died and left an unusual will. She will inherit her father’s estate only on the condition that she spends seven nights in his spooky palatial mansion. Reporter Val Henderson (Dean Jones) stays with her and they discover that the house makes moaning sounds, has a peculiar white bunny given to appearing and disappearing at will, has a skeleton which flies across the room suspended on a wire (shades of HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL), and an ominous “locked room at the top of the stairs”. Cassie’s former nursemaid Dolly (Virginia Gregg) turns up, an embittered alcoholic. She eventually tells Cassie that her mother hadn’t run away as she had been told, but that Duke accidentally beheaded Melinda with the guillotine one night and Dolly helped him bury her body in the woods. Cassie slowly begins to realize that the Duke may not be as dead as she thinks he is and that Val may have secrets of his own.

TWO ON A GUILLOTINE is an old-fashioned chiller that plays a lot like one of the William Castle films that were so popular at the time, but it’s far from a great film. The script is weak and there are long scenes of Cassie and Val going out to nightclubs and a carnival that go on forever and don’t add up to much. The screenplay may be a clunky collection of haunted house clichés but where the film works is in its visuals. Well-directed in black and white, the ominous is expressed in camera angles and the creative use of distorting lenses. There are many artful deep focus shots accomplished in their composition and the result is a thriller with worthy cinematic elements that compensate for it’s lame script. There is remarkable scene where the Duke’s will is read in the empty Hollywood Bowl amphitheatre. It’s never explained why it’s read there (wouldn’t it be easier to read in a lawyers office?) but it’s atmospheric and surprising. There is much in TWO ON A GUILLOTINE for anyone interested in films about magicians and magic. The house is decorated with illusionist’s props, weapons and torture devices and the film goes into some knowledgeable detail about the magician’s craft. TWO ON A GUILLOTINE was clearly marketed to teens (its poster declares “Attention Guillotine-agers! and it even had it’s own comic-book tie-in adaptation published by Dell Comics in 1965), but it’s a fairly serious and humorless film.

Cesar Romero is well-cast in the role of the Duke though he only appears at the beginning and end. The lovely Connie Stevens was a popular TV actress at the time famous for playing ‘Cricket Blake’ on the HAWAIIAN EYE show and she spends much of the second half of the movie screaming her lungs out. Dean Jones would go on to star in several children’s films for Disney (THE UGLY DACHSHUND, THE LOVE BUG) and his presence here in retrospect adds to the juvenile nature of the proceedings. Virginia Gregg, who voiced Norman Bates’ mom’s in PSYCHO, is cleverly cast as the disturbed Dolly while Richard Kiel and midget actor Billy Curtis (with his trademark cigar) make brief appearances. TWO ON A GUILLOTINE was directed by rotund actor William Conrad (1920-1994), best known to TV audiences as the star of the shows “Cannonâ€� in the 70’s and “Jake and the Fatmanâ€� in the 80’s and for his voice-over work on “Rocky and Bullwinkle”. Less known about Conrad is that he kept busy in the 1960’s as a director, mostly in television. In 1965 Conrad directed another horror film released theatrically, MY BLOOD RUNS COLD starring Joey Heatherton and Troy Donahue, a reincarnation thriller released recently on DVD under Warner Brother’s Archive label. Conrad makes a clever cameo in TWO ON A GUILLOTINE in a funhouse hall of mirrors sequence and, despite it’s mediocre script, Conrad did make a scary film. One of the strongest features of TWO ON A GUILLOTINE is it’s bombastic score, the last by Max Steiner, a Hollywood legend best known for composing the music for KING KONG and GONE WITH THE WIND.

TWO ON A GUILLOTINE used to play on TV a lot in the late 60’s but then vanished. It never has had any type of release for home viewing and seems to be forgotten by all except the impressionable children who saw it decades ago. It’s hardly a classic but deserves reassessment. A model company called Polar Lights recently reissued the Aurora guillotine kit and someone should do likewise with TWO ON A GUILLOTINE.