Curtis Harrington | Night Tide / 1961

loving a mermaid

by Douglas Messerli

 

Curtis Harrington (screenwriter and director) Night Tide / 1961

 

Having already written about several of Curtis Harrington’s films in this volume, I queried a friend who had just seen a revival of Night Tide about its gay content, having myself previously read several comments that made it appear as if this film was exceptional in Harrington’s career for its lack of LGBTQ subject matter. He verified the fact that there was nothing about homosexuality in this film.

     But obviously that didn’t prevent me from viewing it, even if at first given its subject of a woman who believes she was formerly a mermaid, Mora (Linda Lawson) who falls in love with a sailor, Johnny Drake (Dennis Hopper in his first major role), seemed to suggest this was an entirely heteronormative work.

      As I began to watch this movie, however, I became more and more fascinated with the woman’s presumed delusion, encouraged, in part, by the role of a mermaid she performs in the carney show run by Captain Samuel Murdock (Gavin Muir) on the Santa Monica pier, where she also lives above the pier’s famed merry-go-round.* The mermaid has played a major role in the literature of nearly all cultures from ancient times onward, and was associated often with the siren—the myth this film embraces—who lures men such as Ulysses in Homer’s The Odyssey to their deaths.

      In Night Tide it is rumored by the merry-go-round operators, Ellen Sands (Luana Anders) and her grandfather (Tom Dillon), that Mora has been involved with the death two of her previous lovers, and they quickly warn Johnny of the fact after he meets Mora at a jazz club and almost immediately falls in love.

      I was intrigued not only by the long history of the mermaid through mythical tales and literature, but, obviously, by the more modern reappearances of the mermaid, the most famous of which appears in Hans Christian Andersen’s (who was gay or least bi-sexual) renowned story “The Little Mermaid” of 1873, itself influenced by the fairytale novella Undine by German author Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué.

      Why, I wondered, had Harrington chosen this strange myth in which to weave his story about the beautiful and utterly innocent sailor played by Hopper, just the kind of figure with whom you might imagine the filmmaker to have fallen in love? Even more strangely, although the couple are obviously attracted to one another, they seem to never engage is sex. Johnny’s visits to her apartment result with him even curling up on her couch to sleep, but he never moves into her bed.

       The movie ends with her quite inexplicably inviting him to go scuba diving, where she appears to cut his breathing hose, although he manages to struggle back to the surface, she disappearing from sight.

       Almost as in the Andersen story, however, there is a kind seemingly tacked-on ending where after that event, Johnny discovers her body back in the tank of the carney show, Captain Murdock later admitting to police that he had killed the other men who had grown too close to Mora. When he found and adopted the young orphan, he implanted the idea of her being a mermaid in order to keep her close, and later made her feel responsible for the deaths of her previous would-be lovers. Yet he denies knowing anything about the dark “Water Witch” (Marjorie Cameron) who also seems to haunt Mora’s life, and who Johnny has noticed several times.

      What was Harrington in his story turned into a filmscript trying to tell us? Was Mora secretly in a lesbian relationship? And what did she mean by loving the ocean but also being terrified of it, particularly with the strange almost coded message that rings out from her words: “I guess we’re all afraid of what we love,” reminiscent of Oscar Wilde’s line from The Ballad of Reading Goal, “Yet each man kills the thing he loves.” Like Val Lewton’s 1942 film Cat People there are some women who are inherently dangerous, despite Johnny’s intense skepticism of Mora being able to hurt him or anyone else.

    Upon further rumination I suddenly realized that the mermaid is the perfect metaphor for a transsexual, a woman who cannot provide her man vaginal sex (or as Bette Midler performing as the mermaid Dolores Del Lago boldly belts out: “The question before us is where’s her clitoris”), having her lower half covered over with fish scales. If Mora is not literally transsexual, she is metaphorically so, kept away by the man who controls her life and is willing to kill all others who come too close and might dare to undress her and discover her secret.

     The film made in 1961, in order to properly distributed (and even then it was held from general release until 1963) had also to offer a possible heteronormative ending, as at the close Johnny promises to come back and visit the true woman who pines for him, Ellen, who operates this merry-go-round of this movie.

     Harrington’s movie is not at all a horror film, but seems like one, layered with images that hint of darker meanings, accompanied by the wonderfully moody jazz score by David Raksin. Instead, it’s a love story that cannot openly speak its subject.

 

*Coincidentally, I am told that my friend Paul Sand actually lived above the Santa Monica Pier’s carousel.

 

Los Angeles, November 19, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2024).