To hear Francis Ford Coppola’s commentary on his new director’s cut of his $40,000 horror film “Dementia 13” is to hear the years melt away in an 82-year-old man’s voice. Suddenly, he is a 21-year-old budding filmmaker giddy at getting a shot at making his first feature, brash enough to buy an Alfa Romeo sports car but too shy to ask out his leading lady.
Shot in Ireland and produced by Roger Corman through his American International Pictures, “Dementia 13” (1963) is Coppola’s latest foray into his past work.
He has released restorations and/or director’s cuts of “Apocalypse Now,” “The Godfather, Part III,” “The Cotton Club” and “The Conversation” in the past two years. But those were big-scale films, some of them enduring classics.
As for “Dementia 13”?
“I was so proud that I made something that vaguely looked like a movie,” Coppola says in the commentary.
He continued to say he was thrilled to get his first review in the New York Times, which he thought commended his “solid” direction. The review actually called his direction “stolid,” which he had to look up.
The 4K restoration of cinematographer Charles Hannawalt’s black-and-white images is beautifully done, and maybe that contributes to feeling that the film is better than I remember. Long banished to public domain and available in faded, sometimes choppy prints, the restoration is a revelation.
It’s also shorter. Coppola’s cut clocks in at 69 minutes, six minutes less than the original 75 minutes after Coppola excised extra footage Corman shot and re-edited sequences that the producer changed.
Not that Coppola held it against Corman. The legendary grindhouse producer-director was giving Coppola his first big break: Coppola served as sound man on Corman’s “The Young Racers,” also shot in Europe, and gave Coppola $20,000 saved from that production, plus many of his cast and crew, to make “Dementia 13.” (Coppola presold the British rights to the film to come up with the extra 20 grand.)
The film opens with a husband and wife arguing while in a rowboat at night. The wife, Louise (Luana Anders), wants a divorce, but the husband, John (Peter Read), points out that if they divorce, she is cut out of his mother’s inheritance.
During the argument, he dies of a heart attack. To buy time, Louise dumps his body overboard and fakes a letter to his mother, Lady Haloran (Eithne Dunne), that explains he has left suddenly on business.
Then we are thrust into the macabre world of the Halorans, a family who live in a gloomy Irish castle and still grieving the drowning death of Lady Haloran’s youngest child, Kathleen, seven years earlier. That leaves three adult brothers: John (now dead), manic depressive sculptor Richard (William Campbell, best known for his turn as the title character in the original “Star Trek” episode “The Squire of Gothos”) and the seemingly normal Billy (Bart Patton, Coppola’s pal from UCLA who also served as assistant director).
There is another outsider, also an American blonde like Louise, named Kane (Mary Mitchell, Patton’s real-life wife), who is engaged to Richard but struggles to keep up with his mood swings.
No more of the plot shall be revealed here, but as Coppola points out, Corman wanted to make a rip-off of William Castle’s “Homicidal,” which itself was “inspired” by Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho.” So “Dementia 13” is, as Coppola puts it with a laugh, “a rip-off of a rip-off.”
Maybe so, but this is no slasher film. Coppola shows maturity in handling the psychological horror aspects of his script.
Coppola never got up the gumption to ask out Anders. But he did fall in love with his assistant art director, Eleanor Neil. He and Eleanor have been married 58 years.
“Dementia 13” (not rated) on Blu-ray and available to stream on several digital platforms starting Tuesday, Sept. 21.