Owen Crump (1903-1998), director of what Don Malcolm has called the “psycho-noir” The Couch (1962), led a long life. He was definitely a little bit of this, little bit of that kind of guy. In his 20s he appeared on the Broadway stage in a play, The Cajun, that apparently folded after one performance; later, in 1950, he had a play of his own, Southern Exposure, produced on Broadway (Cameron Mitchell and Pat Crowley were in the cast). He was at one point married to the actress Isabel Jewell, but information about that relationship is sketchy; then for many years he was married to Lucile Fairbanks, Douglas Fairbanks’s and Mary Pickford’s niece.
Crump played many roles in film-making: writer, producer (on Blake Edwards’s Gunn and Don Siegel’s Night unto Night, notably), documentarian (his Korean war documentary short One Who Came Back was Oscar-nominated), television director (on Code 3, yet another syndicated crime drama – there seem to have been a bunch of those). Crump directed two features besides The Couch. Cease Fire! (1953) is an interesting quasi-documentary hybrid, shot in 3-D, no less: “A real military action during the last year of the Korean War is re-enacted on the spot with real soldiers.” (One IMDB commenter calls it unrealistic; go figure.) A 3-D print played at the World 3-D Film Expo II in Hollywood in 2006:
http://www.3dfilmfest.com/Cease_Fire.html
I found this description of Crump’s next feature, The River Changes (1956), shot in West Germany:
“Owen Crump, the documentary filmmaker whose short subjects on the Korean conflict earned a great deal of critical praise, served as producer/director for the fictional anti-Red melodrama The River Changes. The scene is a peaceful village in a mythical European country. When the nearby river changes course, the villagers suddenly find themselves under communist rule. Unable to tolerate the despotism of their new "people's government" rulers, the villagers make plans to escape across the heavily-guarded river. A subplot involves the Romeo-Juliet romance between Eastern-Bloc border guard Kurus (Harald Marsech) and lovely village lass Mayram (Rosanna Rory). During the 1960s, The River Changes was a mainstay of American television; today, it has apparently completely disappeared.” (All Movie Guide)
The Couch, Crump’s last feature, had a story and screenplay worked on by Robert Bloch and Blake Edwards as well as Crump himself. It stars the always-interesting Shirley Knight as a psychiatric assistant and Grant Williams as a serial killer patient. On the basis of The Incredible Shrinking Man, I am a big Grant Williams fan, and would want to see the film for him alone.
The handsome Williams, by the way, was another youthful casualty, dead at 54 (and he had sadly been out of film since 41). He died of peritonitis. Part of what sidetracked his career after his involvement on the TV series Hawaiian Eye was the usual drinking problem; he also had a reputation for being “difficult” (and once got into a real pissing match with Jack Webb during the filming of a Dragnet episode; not recommended). Williams is always described as a “lifelong bachelor” : I have a suspicion what that means (hey, I’m gay myself).
POSTSCRIPT: There had been a lot of talk about "youthful casualties" at The Blackboard: actors who died before reaching 60, of whom there were very many in the years after World War II.
Breakfast is being served
2 years ago
