Arch Hall Jr: Wild Guitars and Nasty Rabbits

Arch Hall Jr. was hired by his daddy to rip up country roads in hot rods, save the world from a caveman, get involved in espionage, and -of course- play in a rock ‘n’ roll band. Did anyone ever have a cooler time in high school?

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The history of cinema is filled with hopefuls who have a career simply because someone in their gene pool is established in the business. Movie databases and reference books can give you countless names like Harold Lloyd Jr., Tori Spelling, Frank Stallone, Ellen Travolta, Charlie Chaplin Jr., Katharine Houghton and Claudia Martin. Seldom do these names come close to matching the legacies of their kin. Every once in a while, however, there is a personality who eclipses their past bloodline. Arch Hall Jr. is one of these. This gap-toothed, wide-eyed, gawky, sandy-haired kid was put into pictures cranked out by his dad, Arch Hall Sr., the head of Fairway International Pictures. Back in the early 1960s, Hall Sr. had put his own acting career backstage to produce and direct modest drive-in exploitation fare, under various pseudonyms to make it seem more people were actually involved.

These pictures would perhaps be less known today were it not for his ingenuity to corral his 16 year-old son into starring in six films that ran the gamut from hot rod to horror genres. Today, Arch Hall Jr. is best known for his appearances in Ray Dennis Steckler’s masterpiece Wild Guitar and the bad-movie favourite, Eegah! Both pictures generously feature Hall and his rockabilly bands playing up a storm at parties where girls swoon over their musical prowess. He seems to be getting additional recognition these days for the sleeper The Sadist, which is generally regarded as his best performance (uh, in relative terms). Arch Jr. was never an Olivier, and his earliest films clearly demonstrate his lack of enthusiasm over being in movies, but as time wore on, he actually became more of a capable performer, and appeared more comfortable in front of the camera. In retrospect, you just can’t help but like the guy.

Arch Hall Jr.’s induction to cinema was 1961’s hot rod JD saga, The Choppers, starring as Jack Bryan, an obnoxious rich kid with an expensive car, who masterminds an operation to strip down abandoned vehicles and sell the parts to a sleaze bag junkyard owner, played by who else, Bruno VeSota. In his first feature, Junior was already credited with composing some inimitable rockabilly songs. One priceless scene features our anti-hero on the back of a flatbed strumming away, and crooning the song “Monkey In My Hatband”, with this great opening verse:

C’mon baby
C’mon baby
C’mon baby
C’mon baby

All right, so these songs wouldn’t threaten the King-Goffin partnership (to name other teenage songwriters), but still the numbers are fun in their whimsical, nonsensical way. 

The next project for the Halls was the midnight masterpiece, Eegah! This non-stop laugh riot features our underdog hero against Richard Kiel as a caveman who has a thing for his girlfriend, played by Arch’s frequent co-star, Marilyn Manning. Hall Sr. was a workhorse for this one: he co-wrote the screenplay and the music under the name William Watters, and directed with the handle Nicholas Merriwether. As we will see, one really cannot discuss the career of either Arch Hall without the other. Hall Sr. also plays Manning’s dad, who is subsequently rescued by Arch Jr. and his dragster. The overachieving actor-writer-director-bottlewasher is certainly no Samuel Fuller, as the middle third is padded endlessly with Arch Jr. reacting to offscreen stock footage of gila monsters and rattlesnakes as he journeys to rescue his would-be father-in-law, and in scenes where reflected light in the foreground moves, and the camera operator’s shadow blatantly appears. I don’t think he really cared to make a quality film of any kind, but he surely succeeded in making something far from mediocre.

Today, Eegah! has added camp value for its casting of pre-James Bond villain Richard Kiel as the lovesick caveman. But for fans of Arch Jr., this film is also a treasure trove. Dad really wanted his boy to be somebody- his son’s first close-up grabs your attention. (Admittedly, it may not rival Rita Hayworth’s entrance in Gilda, but still.) As gas pump jockey Billy darts into the frame heavily mascaraed, with a Tony Curtis coif, it is clear he wanted this kid to be a star. And if the looks didn’t do it, the rock-n-roll would! The elongated pool party scene where Arch and his band play a surf ballad for his girl is merely a showcase for its stars as Arch sings and plays (out of sync) for Valerie, with gratuitous intercuts of Marilyn Manning doing a perverse Esther Williams routine in the swimming pool, hugged by the lens in vintage powder blue monochrome.

Is it really an accident too that Eegah later meets his destiny at the rock-and-roll party where dreamboat Arch is banging out his repertoire? The lovesick caveman has tracked down his betrothed and then is confronted by the cops, but actually if the caveman stuck around long enough, the music would’ve drove him to his grave. 

In one memorable scene, Eegah pushes some shifty cocktail-swilling chatterbox into a pool. That person is Ray Dennis Steckler, the Grade Z visionary who would direct Arch’s next opus… Wild Guitar! Ah, how to put into words this no-buck masterpiece? The Arch Hall oeuvre so far had been made by serviceable directors (at best). Leigh Jason (of The Choppers) had a long if not distinguished career of second features, and then television. In his first feature as director, Ray Dennis Steckler clearly shows signs of talent. As for Arch Hall Jr., too, this serves as quite the showcase. The first frame is a low angle shot of our Choppers star on a chopper driving down those generic country roads. Once he (playing Bud Eagle) arrives in tinseltown and checks out the sites, he settles down in a fleabag café (posters for Eegah, Drivers to Hell and The Choppers adorn the walls!) where he captures the attention of the spunkily cute Vicki (played by Nancy Czar, whose tenure as a figure skater made up the other seven-and-a-half of her 15 minutes of fame). Noticing the guitar, she asks, “Are you a musician?” With Hall’s bashful puppy dog face, he replies, “Well I wouldn’t go as far as to say that.” When Vicki drags Bud to a televised talent show, and prompts the producers to use him as a last-minute replacement, the stage manager grumpily replies, “What do we care? We can always go back to unemployment.”

This gawky kid with a baroque, ducktail mop of hair (rivalling only the hairstyles in Aki Kaurismaki’s Leningrad Cowboys Go to America) belts out “I’m Gonna Love You Baby”, and the studio audience inexplicably jumps to its feet to embrace him and get his autograph! Ah, the magic of movies… Soon Bud is courted by the shifty Mike McCauley, the head of Fairway Records(!), played by, you guessed it, Hall Sr. Wild Guitar is certainly not a showcase for Arch Jr.’s acting talent, but still you can’t help but root for him as he gets involved with corruption, kidnapping and blackmail in the recording business. Because of his uneasiness before the camera, he ends up being somewhat vulnerable, thereby sympathetic. Best of all, there is a generous supply of songs: “You Don’t Love Me Anymore”, the mournful “I Love You Vicki” (featuring the trademark offscreen female choral background), and best of all, the rousing “Twist Fever” in the film’s dynamite finale on the beach. Yes, it is true Arch Jr. was meant to be going places.

Up until this point, little if any good has been said about the credentials of Arch Hall Jr. (excluding anything “good-bad”), not only because he got started in some Grade Z perennial favourites. But The Sadist remains an important benchmark in his career. This has recently been rediscovered as a lost classic, years before films featuring “people in peril” trend in the 1970s. The Sadist (loosely based on the 1950s Charles Starkweather killings, which would also inspire 1973’s Badlands) is generally regarded to be Arch Jr.’s best performance, which may not be saying much once one considers his track record. Truthfully, he gives a VERY broad performance- the over-exaggerated near-cartoonish acting by him and his co-star Marilyn Manning would be at home with the motley brood in Robert Aldrich’s The Grissom Gang. Wearing a LOT of mascara under his eyes and a tub of grease to flatten that mop of hair, Arch actually acts much like Eegah! However, he does seem to have the proper overgrown child visage for this character, as the murderer brandishes a .45 Automatic in one hand, with all-American cookies and soda pop in the other!

This is the first of the films directed by James Landis, who would helm all of Arch Hall Jr.’s remaining work. Landis was a screenwriter who had an impressive directorial effort in the micro budget kidnapping melodrama Stakeout (1962). In this and his subsequent films, it is evident he had talent, and could clearly make something out of whatever was given him. The script is really no great shakes, but Landis is clearly a stylish director. In what was no doubt filmed in time constraints, he makes the effort to make it visually interesting. Best is the use of foregrounds, high angles and oblique close-ups to lend menace and claustrophobia to this scenario. Landis’ DOP is the young, soon-to-be legendary William (Vilmos) Zsigmond, who could also be responsible for the careful framing. However, based on the strength of Stakeout, I am confident that Landis had some creative output as well. Perhaps because Arch clearly wasn’t up to the role of the punk who menaces a stranded trio at a gas station, Landis and Zsigmond took great pains to create the proper atmosphere. 

The next two films, The Nasty Rabbit and Deadwood 76, are the most under-reviewed of Hall’s career. They are not as popular among the “so bad its good” crowd perhaps because they aren’t bad enough! Still, both films offer that Hall Jr. was genuinely trying to be a capable leading man In The Nasty Rabbit, all decked out in a sharp white dinner jacket, Arch is a James Bond-type who teams with many international agents at a ranch (?!?) to thwart the plans of a Communist plot to poison the world with a plague from a contaminated rabbit! If that sounds wild, then watching it is an even more surreal experience. This film is an unsung camp masterpiece awaiting rediscovery. Certainly, it is a surreal grab bag of genres (espionage, musical, comedy) that is directed like a Warner Brothers cartoon on acid by the ghost of Frank Tashlin. Still, producer and co-screenwriter Hall Sr. knows what to include in a movie for his kid. Conveniently, our heroic secret agent is also a recording star! In fact, once the ranch owner’s lovely daughter learns he is to arrive, she (literally) flips for him! As the espionage unfolds into under cranked chase scenes, the film pauses for Arch and The Archers doing numbers like “The Jackrabbit Shuffle.”

At the helm, Landis is clearly capable of injecting the film with the proper tones of cartoonish lunacy, and at the camera again, Zsigmond gives it a candy-coated look which properly conveys the juvenile fantasy atmosphere. Did the Arch Hall cult check out once he tried harder? Here he loses his snotty little sneer and demonstrates some poise as the heroic leading man.

The next (and final) Hall-Landis-Zsigmond partnership culminated in the obscure western, Deadwood 76. This micro-budget oater is in most cases the missing link in the Arch Hall story, because it is hard to find. Regrettably, it is instead a mediocre film which is slow, padded, and uninspired, save for a few occasional bits like a meeting with Wild Bill Hickok and a somewhat rousing finale. In the lead role as a gunslinger who is mistaken for Billy the Kid, Hall is only decent. (Given his resume, this is like equating him to Gielgud.) Again, he tries to give his role some poise, namely in the interesting scene where he guns down a man who ravaged his ladylove. Alas, the Arch Hall Jr. legacy ends- unfortunately not on a high note.

It was said earlier that one cannot talk of one Arch Hall without the other. In the films with Junior, Hall Sr. is never absent from the screen. Often he is featured in patriarchal roles (as in Eegah, and in Deadwood 76, he plays Arch Jr.’s onscreen dad or future father-in-law) or as figures of authority (Wild Guitar). Even his cameo roles are showy and authoritarian. In the climax of The Choppers, he is a radio reporter who spouts profound aphorisms, and he has a surprise (though crucial) cameo in The Nasty Rabbit. His characters almost always offer some profound dialogue: in the finale of Eegah, he strikes a stoic pose and quotes from Genesis. (I kept waiting for him to slip in “twas beauty killed the beast” from the end of King Kong.) Most telling perhaps, is The Sadist, in which he is not onscreen, but the narrator’s voice in the opening- riffing from Rod Serling, and is also heard as the voice on the radio (a continuation of his Choppers role?). Symbolically, Hall Sr. is an omnipresent figure. While he is making vehicles for his son, he is calculatingly putting himself into the spotlight as well. 

Hall Sr.’s spotlight receded at the same time as his son’s retirement from the screen at age 21. He soon folded Fairway, but still flirted with Hollywood. He was a bit player in Robert Altman’s Thieves Like Us, and was the co-writer for Ted Mikels’ Grade Z favourite, The Corpse Grinders. In between the pictures with his kid, Hall co-wrote the obscure nudie comedy, What’s Up Front, also released through Fairway. His screen career quietly faded and he passed away in 1978.

UPDATE! The Arch Hall Jr. cult grew with the films being re-issued to VHS, and the inclusion of Eegah! in MST3K. In the 2000s, Norton Records (a dynamite label re-issuing 50s-60s rockabilly and surf) released a great CD featuring tracks from Hall’s movies. Arch Hall Jr. joined the Air Force, worked through the ranks to captain, and retired in 2003. I don’t think he misses his film career, but since retirement, he has sporadically played his rockabilly in public. Still, we are blessed to have known his screen presence in a half-dozen films made over the course of five years. They are testaments of an unexpected legacy, progenitors of strange worship, and heartfelt testaments of a father’s love for his son.

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Updated from an article published in Vol. #1, Issue #1.