Curtis Harrington’s Night Tide feels like a strange dispatch from a cinematic mist that was and a gathering darkness that would be. It emerges out of that odd schism called the early ‘60s cinematic landscape, at once an ephemeral phantom of noir and an early tremor of the new uncertainty called the New Hollywood. It has a loose, oneiric, wandering sensibility that was a distant descendant of French poetic realism and its American poverty-row counterpart, the cinema of Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur. At one point, the camera tracks through a forsaken coastal town bar and exposes a Night Hawks for the post-Old Hollywood generation, a community of aimless men and women in perpetual passage from one place they’ve been and another they’re going, adrift between a cinema of the past and a cinema not yet. When Dennis Hopper’s Johnny Drake walks down a flight of stairs, his journey is elongated by the camera into a passage into a new realm. He is in flight to a desire that he cannot contemplate, and a love he is both waiting for and not ready to contemplate, much as Hopper himself would become a poster child for the untold inner chaos of a psychedelic cinema that American cinema couldn’t yet formally imagine, as of this film’s release year of 1961, but which seem to haunt this text like a ghost from the future, a fate Night Tide is inevitably building toward. Like its protagonist Drake, like the doomed woman Mora (Linda Lawson) he falls for, Night Tide seems trapped between other things. It is liminal cinema par excellence.

Thus, the film’s ethereal, opaque view of a small coastal Southern California town is that of a space of comings and goings and of stasis. People are always moving through it, but it never seems to change. It’s an entirely otherworldly film, and yet it also seems to approach a vision of naturalistic reality as a “collection (of) odd things,” to paraphrase one character in the film. That sentiment describes the film, and it provides a neat enough summary of the characters. They seem entirely distant from one another, and yet close enough to cause trouble for one another when their feelings outstrip their understanding of themselves. “You’re awfully far away,” one character remarks to Drake, and we get the sense that no one in the film really knows what it means to truly exercise empathetic closeness.

Though director Curtis Harrington certainly always tried to care. His characters seem drawn to each other, and yet they are governed by drives they seem essentially unable to express to themselves, and Harrington’s film evinces a similar sensibility. Attracted to outsiders and wayward figures who do not seem at home in their bodies, Harrington nonetheless seems not at home with them. He seems almost tortured by his remove from them, from their inner feelings, the reasons for their desires. They remain inexplicable to him, and yet all too relatable in this uncertainty, like they are refugees from another film that exercised a violence upon them and they are presently en route to another text that might be more welcoming. The story Harrington paints is a doomed love that is both a genuinely queer text, eternally weirding romance itself, and one that resonates a very universal human sense of longing. When Drake wanders out to the ocean, in search of something to make him fit together, he looks out at the sea, a transfixing portal captured by Harrington as essentially uncapturable, a space of transcendental otherness that promotes a deeply mercurial, sensuous reflectiveness. Like Night Tide, it is a supersensory resonance to the strangeness of existence.

A strangeness that also promotes extreme confusion, even paralysis, captured with an intimate distance by Dennis Hopper as a troubled presage of his later irreputable screen presence. Hopper was the future movie star who would perhaps best embody the New Hollywood’s borderland between passive listlessness and explosive inner rage. Here, playing an essentially opaque man, he is a kind of void for external forces and stray flows that seems to anticipate Harrington’s later, more overtly queer explorations of the ambiguities of desire and sexuality. Soon enough, Hopper would twist and mutate this sensibility into a confused child oddly at home with a worshipful fascism in an episode of the Twilight Zone (which Night Tide would feel at home in) and a sycophantic acolyte to primitivist autocracy in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, not to mention one of cinema’s great cruel, malicious creatures in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (to name two other filmmakers who evoke Harrington’s sense of haunted romanticism and cosmic restlessness). The men he plays are all looking for a receding horizon, embodying a febrile masculinity at once monumental and entirely impressionable. We, the film notes, are “afraid of the things we love,” and, if Hopper’s Drake is ultimately unable to acknowledge his own internal multiplicity and atypicality, many of his later characters would come to fawn over savage, callous idols of masculine imperiality. This was an actor who seemed always ready for embracing uncertainty and otherness, but too often in ways that were rerouted toward oppressing himself and others.

Night Tide is genuinely Lewtonesque in its pregnant capacity for suggestibility, and, in Lewtonesque fashion, it is perhaps more invested in coaxing a mood of luminously gloomy fertility out of limited material rather than really pushing us to the precipice of our minds. But Night Tide is a quietly curious film, one that can easily be read as a precursor to not only later New Hollywood texts but the cinematic lyric poems that Coppola would laminate in the early 1980s, such as Rumble Fish, not to mention the deliciously neurotic queerness of ‘80s quasi-horror texts like Nightmare on Elm Street 2. There’s a slippery, pregnant quality to Night Tide that momentarily feels the homoerotic tinge that Nightmare 2 would explode, as in a suggestive shadow of a man massaging another man that would pass as “subtext” if one didn’t immediately ask “you want me to pound you later.” The other responds that he’d almost “forgotten a pleasure like that,” and Night Tide is filled with similar gestures of dimly remembered connection slipped into the cracks of a society that wants us to forget what really brings us joy.

Night Tide’s arms, though, are like an octopus: inky and suffusive yet spindly, roping in different forms of queerness without limiting itself to any particular reading, or any definitive set of symbols. There’s also a merry go round that feels like a mechanical sea creature in perpetual motion. When Johnny walks under the peer, Harrington shoots the pillars holding up the erection like a forest of untold violence, an abundance hiding a reserve of malevolence. The camera seems to emanate from the sea itself in this scene, quivering in a worried waver hovering perpetually between the normal and the uncanny. At one point, white sunlight becomes a black robe, which in turn approximates an oily tentacle which, elsewhere, seems to become the very thing constricting Drake’s neck, a tie that is a symbol of a choking masculinity he cannot escape. The ocean he looks out at, then, is a vision of celestial multitude, a world that promises escape from all these weapons of control but which also folds them in, that marks Drake in an inescapable bind between his freedom and the violence his character seems unencumbered by and yet wholly capable of perpetrating if called to.

If I’m playing loose with the film’s narrative, it is because the film itself seems interested in treating the story more as a pretext for resonances and echoes than a tight, confident progression. The narrative will finally focus on Johnny Drake’s burgeoning affection for Mora, who plays a sideshow attraction mermaid in the local oddities museum operated by Capt. Samuel Murdock (Gavin Muir). She’s a beguiling thing, as removed from her world as Drake is from his, but she isn’t an object so much as a doomed icon of male longing, a critical marker of mens’ interest in being bewitched by a vision of femininity they cast as other. Johnny is consumed by a kind of love that is struggling through forces within and outside him that he cannot name, but which seem to suggest that he is attracted to that otherization in a way that marks Mora as his inner double rather than his potential lover. She is the repressed side of him that he cannot acknowledge in himself.

Befitting its nearly silent but also pervasive queerness, Night Tide will transfigure the gendered siren myth as well, turning it from a cautionary tale about women as destructive matter beckoning male explorers with conquests they cannot master into a poem of violent affection that turns what seems like fatherly love into loving brutality. When we learn that Samuel Murdock adopted Mora and told her she was a genuine mermaid who could not survive among humans, his interest in paternally loving her becomes a mode of obsessive, oppressive care. And when Mora chooses to “embrace the rapture of the depths,” she is also enacting a transcendental self-obliteration that acknowledges rather than shunning her otherness in a way Johnny seems ultimately unwilling to. While he has been courted by his inner strangeness, he is finally recentered in a male milieu he remains, thus far, bound to. When the film ends, he returns to his version of domesticity without new clarity. Yet the film’s dark hope in elusive oddness remains. It “stopped raining,” he remarks. “That’ll pass,” he receives. The stopping will pass. The rain will return, and, perhaps, the potential of the watery otherness will renew, a dormant residue of a mirror world, a murmur of difference, that has momentarily abated but that will never leave.

Score: 8/10