Watch and track your favorite playlist.
Curated by: kbbels (772 videos)
"Why would anyone want to make a story like this? What good purpose would it serve?" asks Mr. PUAL LEDER, director of Ape, My Friends Need Killing, and I Dismember Mama, is a pre-credit prologue to The Rotten Apple. "After viewing tests, the studio called and said they were ready to cast me as Harry. But after going over the story, I told my wife I wouldn't play that role for a million dollars. Next day, we returned the script to the studio. My associates opened a cabinet and spread a dozen large binders in front of me. They were full of press clippings, magazine stories, police files, and medical documents. Now, like many of you, my wife and I are busy parents too. We have three children and we simply didn't realize that we could be raising a rotten apple right here in our own home! I changed my mind and agreed to produce the film. In a minute, you'll see me as Harry, a wrecker of human beings. I'm sure you'll hate me. At least, I hope you'll hate me," says Mr. Leder about the film he produced and stars in for, we suspect, considerably less than a million dollars. Leaving his wife Edna and infant daughter in a broken-down car by the di side of the road, Ben enters Harry's junkyard looking for a new starter and...well, steps into Hell. He's seduced by the "crazy damn whore" (RUE McCLANAHAN) who lives in a shack, then framed by Harry and beaten by two corrupt cops, while a big bruiser named Blowhard (KING MOODY, the original Ronald McDonald!) tries to Edna... It's obvious the filmmakers wanted something a bit more highbrow than the average "B," and The Rotten Apple actually aspires to profundity. It doesn't succeed, of course, but comes damn close to being what could be considered Existential Exploitation. Leder shouts every line at the top of his lungs, all the characters are crackpots, and there's even more incessant babble here than in the average Andy Milligan film. Released by Headliner Productions in 1963 as The Rotten Apple, it was later re-released as Five Minutes To Love minus Paul Leder's impassioned intro. Director JOHN HAYES cranked out a number of SWV faves such as Shell Shock, The Hang-Up, and Garden of the Dead, while Miss McClanahan played another second-hand sexpot in Hayes' Hollywood After Dark before going on to TV fame in The Golden Girls. One of the three children Leder mentions in his prologue is GERALDINE LEDER, the baby Edna runs around within the junkyard. Another of his daughters, Mimi Leder, has distinguished herself by directing such big-budget Hollywood schlock as The Peacemaker, Deep Impact, and Pay It Forward which suggests that she just might be that rotten apple Paul was worried about. But a final word of caution from Mr. Leder: "This picture is rough. Its story is shocking but enlightening. It was a difficult picture to make. But if it stops one young man from lighting up the wrong kind of cigarette, or one young girl from becoming a bad apple, the sincere efforts of all of us who made it will be genuinely rewarded." You bet.