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| Bert I. Gordon |
GOODBYE TO "MR. BIG:" BERT I. GORDON (1922 - 2023)
. Filmmaker Bert I. Gordon lived to be a hundred and directed his last film. Secrets of a Psychopath, when he was in his nineties! Gordon may not have been a brilliant director along the lines of Hitchcock or Wyler, but his low-budget movies -- especially the giant monster movies which earned him the nickname of Mr. Big (taken from his initials, of course) -- were at their best fun, fast-paced and entertaining.
Some of Gordon's movies were genuinely good. These included
The Amazing Colossal Man with a fine performance from Glenn Langan,
The Food of the Gods with Ida Lupino and Ralph Meeker,
The Magic Sword with Basil Rathbone and Estelle Winwood, and
The Cyclops starring Gloria Talbot and Lon Chaney -- with
The Spider and
Beginning of the End as runners-up. Considering how low the budgets were it's amazing that some of the movies turned out as well as they did. Gordon even directed no less than Orson Welles (!) in the film
Necromancy, a fact that is slightly mind-boggling to contemplate! Imagine the same man who dropped grasshoppers onto photographs to simulate an attack by giant locusts on Chicago advising the great Orson Welles in a movie, although it's probable that he just sat back and let Orson do his thing.
Thanks Bert for giving many genre fans a big amount of pleasure. (I can't tell you how many times I've watched The Cyclops!)
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