Screen Sirens Halloween Edition!

 Cornelia van Gorder
of The Bat (1959)

"I have a gun, and I know how to use it!" 

Just in time for Halloween, a kick-ass lady who battles an evil serial killer! (Spoiler alert, she really does know how to use that gun). In the Vincent Price classic, screen legend Agnes Moorehead (Bewitched anyone?) plays a crime novelist named Cornelia van Gorder who is renting out an isolated house called the Oaks. The Oaks was previously the scene of a bunch of violent murders committed by the mysterious "Bat". After a million dollars are embezzled and hidden in the Oaks, the occupants of the house are the target of attacks from both the Bat and others who know about the secret room where the money may be hidden.

Cornelia is one tough beezy in this campy film. She is childless, husband-less, and utterly self-confident. She makes friends easily, has an enormously successful career writing books, and is witty to boot. She scoffs when her assistant, Lizzie, tells her about the creepy noises she's been hearing. Even when her entire staff heads for the hills in fear, Cornelia remains unflappable. She conducts a phone call to the police in an enviably calm manner after the Bat claws his way into the house, and upon hearing from Lizzie that "his specialty seems to be killing women, my goodness, two of them in one night, all his victims died the same way, like their throats had been ripped open with steel claws," she replies, "That's charming, I'll have to try it in a book sometime." Even after she is locked in an cave-like room that is quickly losing oxygen, she keeps her shit together and manages to yell loudly enough to get Lizzie's attention.

This isn't to say that The Bat is a feminist's fantasy. All the policemen, doctors, and bankers are men. The supporting women gossip, take holidays, and appear as arm candy. The men travel, conduct business, shoot the guns, and go on hunting trips. One of the other stronger female characters in the movie is Dail (Elaine Edwards). After she and another house guest hear the Bat overhead, she insists on trying to capture him even as it puts her in great danger. That's good and fine, but it only comes after she spouts "Think of what it could mean to Vick!" (her recently incarcerated husband accused of pinching the million).


However, whatever the men have to add to the movie paled in comparison to Cornelia's immortal lines and impossibly businesslike demeanor in killing the killer. In the climax scene, the Bat has lit the garage on fire and plans on breaking into the secret room while the women run to put out the fire. Cornelia insists that they ignore the diversion and remain in the room so that they can ambush the nocturnal menace. "He'll kill again if we get in his way... we've got to be as clever as he is!" she cries. Cornelia van Gorder is most certainly that.

Ps: Happy Halloween, rebel girls!
-Lee

Rebel Pic of the Day

Hello, hell yes.

Haley again!

Rebels Across History

Diana di Prima

The Beat movement of the late 1950s/early '60s was a time of social upheaval, during which a cast of writers and poets took drugs, talked philosophy, and immortalized each other in their own books. Unfortunately the radicalism of the time extended mostly to men. The Beat women were either wives of gay men or minor characters struggling to get their writings published while the men in the circle enjoyed great success with their works. One glaring exception is that of Diana di Prima.

Born in 1934 to Italian parents with an anarchist ancestry,  di Prima began writing at an early age, and by 14 was committed to becoming a poet. She dropped out of Swarthmore College in Brooklyn, and moved to Manhattan where she became a fixture on the Beat scene. Her first book of poetry was published when she was eighteen, called This Kind of Bird Flies Backward. She supported herself with nude modeling jobs. In 1961, she began editing the literary newsletter, The Floating Bear with the father of one of her children, LeRoi Jones (pictured below), and wrote some of the newsletters's most memorable poems. During this time she co-founded the New York Poets Theatre, and founded the Poets Press, which published the work of many new writers of the period.

di Prima bore several children through this time, all of different paternity. She considered the archetype of the father as an anachronistic myth. As always, she straddled the line between masculine and feminine. She wore non-sexual men's shirts and Levis and sported a red cropped haircut, yet lived a sexually promiscuous lifestyle, even penning the cult classic, Memoirs of a Beatnik. Mostly fictional, the book contains an stunning number of orgy scenes.

As the Beat's popularity dwindled, diPrima moved on to participate in Timothy Leary’s psychedelic community at Millbrook in upstate New York. She then settled in San Fransisco, where she studied Eastern philosophy and religion, taught writing classes, and wrote the remainder of her 43 published works.

Diana di Prima managed to do what few could in the Beat era. She balanced family with independence, poetry with self-indulgence. Of the many casualties of the Beats, she has also been able to keep it together and stay alive (See Jackson Pollock, Lenny Bruce, Neal Cassady, and Jack Kerouac who all died young and wasted). All as a woman and a minority, in a movement that was made up of white men and was largely homosexual. Wrote fellow Beatnik poet, Allen Ginsberg, "[di Prima was] a great woman poet in second half of American century, she broke barriers of race-class identity, delivered a major body of verse brilliant in its particularity."

Sources:

Dianadiprima.com

California Writer

Hip: The History by John Leland

Rebel Pic of the Day

A "Rosie the Riveter" working during World War II.