After playing second fiddle to doomed mentor James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause and Giant, a baby-faced Dennis Hopper landed his first leading role in Curtis Harrington’s independent Night Tide. As Johnny, Hopper’s a naive Navy serviceman spending his shore leave on the Santa Monica Pier. Inside a jazz club, he meets the mysterious Mora. How mysterious? The woman lives above a merry-go-round, calls eating at 11 a.m. “breakfast” and works at the boardwalk’s carnival as a “lovely siren of the sea.” That’s a euphemism for “mermaid.”
The longer the sailor courts Mora (Linda Lawson of William Castle’s Let’s Kill Uncle), the more Johnny suspects she may be an actual mermaid. After all, she’s skittish and vague about her background, and followed around by a witch (Marjorie Cameron, subject of Harrington’s The Wormwood Star). Then there’s the matter of Mora’s boss (Sherlock Holmes film series veteran Gavin Muir, in his final big-screen appearance) warning Johnny that dating her is literally dangerous, what with the dead boyfriends in her wake.
The first full-length movie from iconoclast writer/director Harrington (Queen of Blood), this is your basic story of boy meets girl, girl might have a smelly fish tail. Causing barely a ripple upon release, the black-and-white SoCal Gothic is revered today as a masterpiece of mood — recognition no doubt accumulated from its longstanding residence in the public domain.
So dreamy is Harrington’s visual spell, any shortcomings — like the phony arms of the octopus Johnny wrestles — tend to fall from a critical eye’s line of sight. Numerous examples of true art can be found among this rinky-dink production’s frames. Although Night Tide is streamable in color, don’t; seriously, it kills a considerably intoxicating vibe. —Rod Lott