• Directed by Curtis Harrington
• Written by George Edwards and Barry Schneider
• Starring
  • Piper Laurie
  • Stuart Whitman
  • Roger Davis
  • Janit Baldwin
  • Sal Vecchio
• Produced by George Edwards
• Executive produced by Steve Krantz

From the filmmakers’ perspective, Piper Laurie was the perfect actress to cast in this movie. She was fresh from her costarring role in Carrie (1976), which netted her an Oscar nomination. As this movie also dealt with paranormal phenomena centered on a troubled teen, casting Laurie as the mother again would provide just the visibility that this smaller movie needed.

From Laurie’s perspective, though, it may not have been a good choice. She had begun acting in 1950 and gotten an Oscar nomination in 1962 for The Hustler (1961), but Carrie represented a return to Hollywood after almost a decade away. Was it really wise to follow her praised performance in Carrie with a role which could easily be seen as “more of the same”? It’s impossible to second-guess the what-ifs of her career choices, but these two movies were followed by a steady decade of nothing but television roles, and while she did later get back into movies (she got another Oscar nomination in 1987 for her work in Children of a Lesser God (1986)), she never did manage to maintain the level of visibility to which actors hope an Oscar nod will lead. One has to wonder if her appearance in Ruby cooled the iron of her career before she could strike decisively. Yes, that is your mangled metaphor of the day.

“Everybody knows (la la la) A little place like Kokomo…”

At first glance, the roles would seem to be worlds apart: a repressed and repressive Christian matriarch vs. a torchy lounge singer and former gun moll past her prime. But both characters are very strong, very flamboyant in their way. And of course, both movies feature as one of their themes the strained relationship between a mother (Laurie) and a teenaged girl — although that theme isn’t as central in Ruby as its post-Carrie marketing campaign would have you believe.

The movie starts in Florida in 1935, with Ruby (Laurie) and her beau and impregnator Nicky (Sal Vecchio) taking a nighttime drive down by the swamp; unfortunately, they’re met there by a mob posse, which perforates Nicky and lets his body sink into the swamp. The trauma sends Ruby into labor. The scene is played without dialogue, and only Ruby’s scream and the sound of gunshots mixed in with the period music. Unfortunately, the confidence of that cinematic storytelling is immediately undermined by the inclusion of a narrator to bring us up to speed (on whom, more later).

Sixteen years later, Ruby still lives in the old house attached to now-closed mob club, and instead runs the drive-in theater down the hill, where she’s given jobs to all the old ex-con mobsters. Mob boss Jake (Fred Kohler Jr.) is now a silent wheelchair-bound man with dark glasses and palsied hands, sitting around Ruby’s house like a houseplant. And the child of that night, Leslie (Janit Baldwin), is now sixteen years old and mute, wandering around the house with a dazed, deer-in-the-headlights stare. (This is supposed to be sort of creepy and unsettling, I think, although my immediate conclusion, given the bubbly Ruby is sucking down in the 1935 sequence, is that she’s the victim of fetal alcohol syndrome.) The only even-keeled person she associates with is Vince (Stuart Whitman), the old mobster who manages the drive-in and keeps his torch for Ruby well-hidden. The drive-in, by the way, is of a peculiar time-warp variety; though the remainder of the movie is set in 1951, the feature of the week is Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, which wasn’t released until 1958.

“Ooh! Pick me! Pick me!”

Into this melancholy but stable setup, weird happenings insert themselves. The former mobster turned projectionist Jess (Edward Donno) is hassled by invisible forces that knock things off his shelves, before throttling him with unraveled film. That same night, another former mobster gets skewered by a tree limb, after failing to put the moves effectively on the town slut (Crystin Sinclaire). For being a former mobster’s squeeze, Ruby shows an appalling lack of instinct for self-preservation, simply ordering Vince to sink the bodies in the swamp to avoid police interest, and never once considering that some sort of malevolent force is at work, human or otherwise. Nothing gets to interrupt her lifestyle of wandering around the house in slinky dresses and feather boas, sauced to the gills.

Vince is convinced there’s something spooky going on, though, so he calls in someone he knew from prison: Dr. Keller (Roger Davis). Dr. Keller wasn’t an inmate; exactly how he interacted with prisoners is unclear, but he’s a fairly capable psychic, and calls himself a doctor of parapsychology to boot. (This despite that the only accredited doctorate of parapsychology ever awarded wasn’t given until 1980.) Dr. Keller immediately starts picking up on stuff like a history of violence around the drive-in, the involvement of a woman with red hair (that’d be Ruby, you know), and Leslie’s tweaked mental condition.

Teen acne run amuck!

It may shock you to realize that we’re fully halfway through the movie at this point. “But barely anything’s happened!” you protest. And you’re right. It’s a remarkably slow-moving picture, with yard after yard of filmstock taken up with Ruby drifting around her home in well-marinated nostalgia, or various small-time characters interacting at the drive-in. (Especially bewildering is the numerous scenes with the town slut — not only does she have nothing to do with the main plot of the movie besides proximity, but she doesn’t even have a legitimate subplot of her own. She just keeps showing up in time-passer scenes.) Eventually, things start to get spookier, with Ruby seeing spectral visions of Nicky, his face punctured by bullet holes. Oh, and there are more deaths, of course. But after the first two, they’re almost perfunctory, with no lead-up or suspense until the discovery of yet another ex-mobster body.

And thanks to the fact that Dr. Keller is around to ask questions on our behalf, the whole backstory comes out: Ruby had been Jake’s main squeeze, but Nicky had moved in while Jake was in the joint for a minor offense. When Ruby got pregnant by Nicky, Jake stepped in to cut him out of the picture. And Nicky died thinking Ruby had set him up.

So why is the ghost of Nicky back these days to settle up? Again, we have Dr. Keller’s presence to thank for our para-psychobabble explanation: Ruby, whose relationship with Leslie has always been bipolar, has finally decided to put the simple girl in an institution. Despite having absolutely no outward reaction, Leslie is apparently agitated about this, and the combination of adolescence and an angtsy unfocused mind give Nicky the channel through which he can manifest himself, most directly when he possesses Leslie to hurl accusations and violence at Ruby. Oh, and then there’s the scene in which Nicky manages to manifest his facial bullet wounds, stigmata-like, on poor Leslie — an image which was the basis of most of the movie posters.

These gangsters, they all think they should be in the movies…

There’s more general spookiness and poltergeist-like activity to come, but it’s oddly uncompelling, mainly because there’s a singular lack of suspense at work here. The killings after the first couple come without buildup; the spooky manifestations each have no effect on the course of the story thereafter; and none of the main characters are at all dynamic or active. Ruby, the title character, mostly waits around fatalistically; Leslie, the focus of the Carrie-parallel marketing, spends three-quarters of the movie staring blankly and the remaining time doing a low-rent version of The Exorcist; Vince is hemmed from action by his acquiescence to Ruby’s wishes and his pseudo-fatherly regard for Leslie; and even Dr. Keller is more the Avatar of Exposition than an active participant. The result is that when the climax comes, it not only seems inevitable in retrospect (as all good endings do), but it seems to have followed a straight course from the opening credits, without any plot twists or reversals.

I promised to speak more of the spasmodic narration: It’s supposed to be Dr. Keller, but there’s no context given for the viewer to figure it out. According to director Curtis Harrington in the commentary, the original plan was to have Keller’s narration be a framing device for the whole movie. But executive producer Steve Krantz butchered the ending, adding footage with a Piper Laurie stand-in and a murderous underwater skeleton that disrupted not only Harrington’s vision of the resolution of the story, but also nixed Dr. Keller’s closing narration (and resolution to the framing device). Harrington seems like an affable old fellow on the commentary, which lends impact when he matter-of-factly describes Krants as “both evil and stubborn.”

Not every actress can pull off being overdressed and underdressed at the same time.

As with so many movies whose potential far outweighs their execution, Ruby seems to suffer from a lack of focus. Even putting aside its status as a pseudo-Carrie hanger-on, it’s hard to make an engaging film centered on a passive protagonist who refuses to be active in the resolution of her own fate.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 7
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• dream sequences: 1
• ominous thunderstorms: 2
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 3
  • Paul Kent (Louie, one of the mobsters) played “Lt. Commander Beach” in Star Trek 2
  • Jack Perkins (Avery, another mobster) played “Master of Game” in the classic episode “Bread and Circuses”
  • Edward Donno (Jess, the ex-mobster projectionist) did stunts in Star Trek 2, Star Trek 3 and First Contact