A Cool Sound from Hell (1959)

A Cool Sound from Hell (Canada, 1959) 71 min B&W DIR-PROD-SCR: Sidney J. Furie. MUSIC: Phil Nimmons. DOP: Herbert S. Alpert. CAST: Anthony Ray, Madeline Kronby. (Caribou Productions)

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Before Don Owen’s Nobody Waved Goodbye or Don Shebib’s Goin’ Down the Road, Canadians had already attempted feature filmmaking with commercial appeal. For that matter, decades before the Tax Shelter era, these early homegrown movies worked in genres: Julian Roffman’s The Bloody Brood (1959) and The Mask (1961) and William Davidson’s Ivy League Killers (1959) were among those titles that endeavoured to jumpstart an industry. Included in this short-lived “new wave” were Sidney J. Furie’s first two films, A Dangerous Age (1958) and A Cool Sound from Hell (1959). A Cool Sound from Hell never got play in its native land, and shortly Furie would move to England where his career took off with classics The Leather Boys and The Ipcress File. For decades, A Cool Sound from Hell remained unseen and forgotten until Furie and his biographer Daniel Kremer had managed to wrest it from a BFI vault. The film had a one-time screening at the 2016 edition of TIFF. Furie, who was in attendance, was reportedly moved to tears. We mortals who didn’t work banking hours but wanted to see this movie too had another chance, at a one-off screening held in conjunction with the Paradise on Bloor’s grand opening.

The Paradise Cinema, once part of Toronto’s Festival chain of repertory cinemas, had remained boarded up after Festival Cinemas disbanded in 2006, until the building was purchased and renovated by Moray Tawse, who was passionate about giving the space a new lease on life with screenings, a performance space, and a bar in the lobby. All of this coalesced on a Sunday afternoon, in which A Cool Sound from Hell was preceded by a live jazz band playing familiar jazz standards from the movies. How apropos to fete a film which offered an exposé on Toronto’s hip late 1950s beatnik scene! All the better, if one so desired, they could chase the movie with a cocktail or espresso! Turning this excursion into even more of an “event”, the film’s original composer, 96-year-old local jazz legend Phil Nimmons made a personal appearance. After the film, TIFF’s Steve Gravestock (also author of a monograph on Don Owen, who ironically has a cameo in this film) moderated a live Zoom chat with Sidney J. Furie, beaming in from an editing room in California- still working at age 86!

A Cool Sound from Hell is also of historical interest in its casting of Anthony Ray, who had appeared in an American “beat era” classic, John Cassavetes’ directorial debut, Shadows (1959). In his introduction, Gravestock had alleged that the actor had made these films simultaneously, going back and forth from Toronto to New York, though I’m not sure if those production dates add up. Anthony Ray (the son of director Nicholas Ray) would go on to be an assistant director, and then as a producer for Paul Mazursky, notably being Oscar-nominated for An Unmarried Woman (1978). He is also remembered today for marrying actress Gloria Grahame, who was formerly the young man’s stepmother after briefly being married to Nicholas Ray!

In this film he plays Charlie, the naive young man of a beat-tinged romantic triangle, involved with “bad girl” Steve (Carolyn Dannibale) and the crazy downtown Toronto beatnik scene. At first, these hipsters are presented as innocently fun troublemakers who (gasp!) drive around Toronto at night while blaring jazz cassettes like Benny Goodman Live at Carnegie Hall full blast, until their involvement with drugs comes to the fore. Will “good girl” Debbie (Madeline Kronby) save him in time?

A Cool Sound from Hell is no lost Canadian classic, as it offers nothing new in the JD movie tropes that are common in “beat era” films, and has an unfortunate climax in a setting that looks nothing like a cockpit interior (presaging the ways in which the Canadian B movie world would cut corners in production). Still, it moves well, and has great value for its exteriors of Toronto night life, before David Secter came along with Winter Kept Us Warm, featuring splendid, crisp black and white cinematography by Herbert Alpert. According to the IMDB, his credits seem to dissipate at the time that this hopeful “new wave” of Canadian genre films also petered out. This career is emblematic of the bittersweet feeling we often get while revisiting Canada’s cinematic past. While one is very fortunate to be seeing revivals of films that have been unfairly neglected by time, once the lights come up, we leave the theatre with melancholy reminders of “what could have been”.

Now if only someone could track down A Dangerous Age...