The San Francisco Examiner from San Francisco, California • 151

V. MOVIES Michael Winner Shocks With the Armies of Hell i I fly Ret Reed 1 IT: I. V. PL J' i i 1 If' i 1 A i -A' ''it 1 fv HORROR MOVIES, the psychologists tell us. are just another visual.

vocal and visceral way to te ll we're ullve. A scream a day keeps the doctor away The public laps up hair-curling, bone hilling terror like spaniels devour Hamburg er. "Rosemarys Baby." The Exort 1st." 'The Omen'' not to mention suc low budget classics as The Night of the Living Dead" arid 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" have pumped fresh dividends Into Hollywood's empty coffers. Now there-! a new horror on the horizon that threatens to break new bux office records. It's called The Sentinel," (now at tho St.

Francis, Alhambra. Plaai and Ist's hard to believe that Michael Winner, the director, is the same man who last year turned out a dumb little dog picture Called "Won Ton Ton." "Us quite simple, really," he hays, dipping Coca Colas and puffing Cuban cigars in his New York hotel suite while fighting off the jet lag from a transatlantic flight. "After 'Won Ton Ton' 1 certainly wasn't petting any more offers to direct comedies! Besides, I like the idea of frightening people." Before our meeting, three Hple bad warned me Winner was a feisty egomaniac whose first love was self promotion. "Ken Russell and I both have that reputation." he laughs wickedly, "but I think we're both terribly charming! Of course, he raps critics over the head with blunt instruments. I'm too much of a coward.

Publicity is good fun. I don't go around knocking on doors to pet my name in the paper, but as long as I've got a film 1 don't mind trying to sell it." The one he's selling now Is 7. 1 PACE IS "It totally unpredictable! 'Won Ton Ton' wa enttrmnusly publicized In the press before It opened, yet from the ery first day, the theater was empty, so nobody can tell me publicity sell movie. I'efore an ldy mw It, including the critics, the public had already made a Silent decision to pa- It by. OjM'iilng day In New York ookI like World War III had leen declared.

"Conversely, on 'Death Wish' we had no advance publicity at all. nolMHly had ever heard of the picture, Charles Hronson bad never had a hit in New York, and ox nimj day, before one review ap poared. there were riots In the theater. Bronson never took a nkkel in New York before 'Death and he hasn't had a success since, yet It's one of the top grossing pictures of alt time. It's an extraordinary business!" He's just as candid about the controversial stars he's directed.

Ava Gardner: "I cast her as the realtor In "Sentinel" lie-cause every time I rent an apartment in New York I get it from a realtor who looks just like Ava. She keej saying she's a lousy actress, but she's very good. She's a recluse. She lives near me In an old Victorian house In London and hardly ever goes anywhere or sees anyone. She hardly leads a film star life, to put it mildly." Brando, in "The "I saw a side of him you don't often see.

He was cheerful, dedicated and worked for no money. That whole film was financed by a rich man for fM.m a fraction of what Brando usually gets for his salary alone and he as very loyal to It. He made them delay 'Godfather' while he did my picture. He insisted on eating with the crew to prove he wasn't a snob, yet he drove around in limousines with an entourage. Curious contradictions In his character." Charles Bronson: "We were In Spain, doing 'Chato's and he had to cut the ropes that tied up a naked woman In the desert.

He stopped the film and announced, "I will not appear on the screen with a naked It was 9 p.m. in Almeria. and there was no point in arguing. I shot them separately, then edited It together later. Years later, he cornered me and said, 'You still made it look like I was onscreen with a naked Utter nonsense." Alain Delon, In "His English was so poor 1 asked him to speak slower, and he stormed off the set.

'On all my other American pictures they told me to speak fast so It would look like I understood what I was he fumed. I said, 'all of your other American pictures were total (So was "Scorpio," which showed the CIA doing naughty things before It was fashionable.) (Atrajo Hetrt MICHAEL WINNER AND SYLVIA MILES where the big scene was a 14-yearold girl masturbating with a crucifix, you've got to go some to shock anybody!" But Winner, who already shocked folks with the realistic rape scene In "Death Wish," did it again by hiring real freaks from hospitals, freak shows, circuses and asylums to play the devils from Hell. "It took two hours Just to make up John Carradine as a blind priest, and he looked like he'd had a rather late night the night before! To do 30 people In makeup with lights melting the wax would've been corny. All it says in the book the movie Is based on Is The armies of Hell rose I didn't want 30 extras with white faces wobbling about. I wanted something spectacularly horrifying! In Marlowe, Dante and the paintings of Heironymous Bosch the creatures of Hell were hideously deformed, so I said, 'Let's get the real Universal knew what I was up to they got carbons of letters saying, 'Dear Mr.

Deformed, please come for an interview at 3 o'clock but they didn't want it publicized." Freaks have been used before, in Tod Browning's repugnant classic "Freaks." Brian De Palma used them In "Sisters," but squeamish execs got cold feet and cut them out of the film. Never has anything like "The Sentinel" been seen by human eyes, however. Some audiences leave the theater raving about the scary makeup, not knowing the truth. Unfortunates with their faces eaten away, goiters, missing eyes and appendages, and worse they are all here, and one wonders why they did it. "Each one read the script, signed releases and got a promise they could leave if they were offended in any way.

There was nothing sensational about it, and I have a clear conscience," says Winner. The remarkable thing Is that the creatures we used turned out to be the happiest, most professional group of people I've ever worked with in 20 years of making films. This was their moment in the sun. 40ne man wrote me he had been a recluse ho never went out of his home before the film was made because he thought he was the ugliest man in the world. The movie proved to him that there were others worse off than he was.

"It also had a comic side to it, too. We put them up in hotels during the weekend of the Tall Ships, and the tourists were a bit mortified, I think. Then we gave them chauffered Cadillacs, and the crowds on the set would come around when the cars pulled up, hoping to see Ava Gardner, and out would pop these freaks! They had a sense of humor about it. Nobody had ever asked them to join in life before. "Sylvia Miles had to play with thern in the nude.

Her only complaint was that one of them kept pinching her on the bottom!" Sylvia Miles also had to munch the brains of a fresh corpse onscreen. "It was bread soaked in chemical syrup, and she wasn't really supposed to eat it, but she got carried away and it seemed like such a shame to disturb her. The makeup man whispered to me: "She'i gonna die of food and I said, 'Well, I really don't need her after 4 o'clock, so it doesn't She was okay the next day, so she must have a cast iron stomac If Winner has an ego, it makes good copy. He's not one of those deadly dull directors who goes around eating humble pie and boring the press to death because he doesn't know where his next job is coming from. Winner is witty, opinionated, quick and, after 20 movies, still full of enthusiasm for the business.

"The Sentinel." When he spent Universale $3.5 million quietly last year on location in New York, they didn't say a word. When he showed it to the executives In Hollywood after final editing, they "almost committed suicide by doing a two-foot fall from their padded leather chairs." They asked for a horror film, but they didn't bargain for this. "The Sentinel" is about a beautiful model who rents an apartment In a gloomy old building in Brooklyn Heights only to discover it is the gateway to Hell. Corpses come to life, demons ooze and slither through the hallways at mid- night, the blood splashes across the screen shamelessly, and the audience shrieks its way home to a week of nightmares. Going to bed after seeing "The Sentinel" is like going to bed after a dinner of raw chili peppers and ground glass.

Michael Winner loves the imagery of that. Every scream means dollars in the cash register. "Audiences are fairly un-shockable today," he shrugs. "If you're following in the footsteps of 'The Dotebook, Sunday, February 27, 977.