HOT RODS TO HELL: if, by hell, you mean watching this film

HOT RODS TO HELL is an absolute camp classic!
From the atrocious dialogue to the even more atrocious acting the film is a total treat from start to finish.
My particular favorites are the abysmal performances by the film's two veteran stars, both well past their prime and experienced enough to have known better than to associate themselves with this embarrassing B movie project.

Dana Andrews had made a name for himself in the 1940s as a stolid leading man in classics such as 'Laura', 'A Walk in the Sun' and 'The Best Years of Our Lives.' But by 1967 his best years were decades behind him and he was reduced to accepting parts like Tom Phillips, the emasculated father of a family terrorised by a gang of hot rod driving teenage yobs in the Californian desert. An earlier car accident has left Tom a frightened man, lacking both the courage and the resources to defend his wife Peg (Jeanne Crain), young son and teenage daughter from these young hooligans. In fact his manhood's so shrivelled there's not even fly in his pants!
The part's not much of a stretch for Andrews. Never one of Hollywood's most dynamic or expressive of actors, here he looks washed out and washed up. Even the very visible over-abundance of make-up can't hide his deathly pallor and bad dye job. But his appearance is nothing compared to his diction. For the most part he sounds like a man trying to speak while also attempting to keep hold of a pair of insecurely glued dentures. Some lines are so slurred as to be practically incomprehensible. Andrews had a well publicised battle with alcoholism and I wouldn't be surprised to learn he was in the midst of that war while shooting this film.
Co-star Crain makes a game attempt to match him with a delivery style normally only heard on particularly cheesy late night infomercials for weight loss products. Each line oozes an exaggerated fake sincerity topped only by her even more exaggerated reactions to the various dilemmas she finds herself in. Her acting is just so plain awful it's difficult to believe she was a seasoned professional gainfully employed in Hollywood since 1943. Her performance here would embarrass an amateur pantomime production.

Honorable mentions go to Laurie Mock who plays the part of the Phillips teenage daughter like a clueless actress responding to the director's off-camera coaching calls ("look frightened - more frightened, now look infatuated - more infatuated, ok, now look frightened again" etc etc), and Paul Bertoya as Duke, the least menacing menacing teenage hoodlum in cinema history. Quite what either of them saw in the other is beyond me.
Perhaps what's most shocking is that HOT RODS TO HELL was released by MGM - the king of the Hollywood studios! the home of Gable, Garbo, Gardner, Gene Kelly, Judy Garland and more stars than there are in heaven! That the studio put its name to this piece of exploitation trash says more about the state of American society in the 60s than the story it tells ever could.

WHILE THE CITY SLEEPS: you'll believe a Redwood can act

WHILE THE CITY SLEEPS features more B-grade stars than you can shake a stick at. Just start shaking while I reel off the names - Dana Andrews, Vincent Price, Thomas Mitchell, Ida Lupino, George Sanders, Rhonda Fleming, and Howard Duff. I bet your arm got tired before I finished.
Some of them were never big enough to carry a film on their own, while the others were no longer big enough by 1956 to pull an audience on their own. I'm talking about you Dana Andrews.
But package them all together in a thriller directed by the great Fritz Lang and you've got something that's worth watching. Or, at least, that's the theory.

Andrews heads the ensemble as talented newspaper journalist Edward Mobley who finds himself caught up in an increasingly vicious power struggle between three senior executives at his New York City paper following the death of its longtime publisher, Amos Kyne.
Kyne's successor is his ineffectual and embittered son Walter (Price) who attempts to assert his authority by offering the newly created position of Executive Director to whichever of the three is the first to solve the "Lipstick killings" currently gripping the city. Mobley finds his experience as an investigative reporter suddenly in demand but his real interest lies in persuading longtime fiancee Nancy to marry him. 
It's Andrews as Mobley who waters down what should be a heady brew of politics and passion. Never the most expressive of actors, by middle age he had hardened into a piece of wood more solid than a giant Californian Redwood. Clearly this unflappable dependability was seen as an asset by the studios which continued to cast him in leading man roles for two decades, but he comes across as dull and bloodless.
There's no sense of genuine passion behind his constant professions of love and (shock, horror!) lust for young Nancy and one wonders what on earth she sees in this dull middle aged man. Surely she can foresee the boring life of fetching his pipe and slippers that stretches ahead of her should she yield to his entreaties.  
Andrews plodding style sucks much of the life and sparkle out of the story and out of his fellow actors' enthusiasm for their parts. They turn in perfectly adequate performances but none of them give the film anything close to everything they've got. It's a B-list effort from Lang as well whose penultimate Hollywood film this was.
I stuck with WHILE THE CITY SLEEPS out of affection for Lang's previous work, and he succeeded in  holding my attention but at the end of it all I was left thinking of what could have been.