Classic Horrors Club

If Two on a Guillotine (1965) seems familiar, like one of William Castle’s early 1960s thrillers, please note it was directed by a different William… William Conrad. Conrad is perhaps best known from over 100 episodes each of Cannon (1971-76) and Jake & the Fatman (1987-1992), but in 1961, he was producing and directing films for Warner Bros. Further, Two on a Guillotine, My Blood Runs Cold (1965), and Brainstorm (1965) were purposeful efforts to compete with Castle.

It may have been too little, too late for Warner Bros. The movies were not successful and a fourth, The Thing at the Door, was never made. Two on a Guillotine is not familiar enough. For one thing, it’s way too long and is padded with a typical love story where the man, Val Henderson (Dean Jones), lies to the woman, Cassie Duquesne (Connie Stevens), to get close to her, but then really falls in love with her. When she finds out, she shuns him, but eventually takes him back for a happy ending.

In this respect, I’d categorize Two on a Guillotine as strictly a romantic… not comedy, but thriller, I guess. Nevertheless, I enjoyed it. It was nice to see the drama of the story in detail instead of painted in broad strokes to give the movie a 90-minute running time. Plus, the circumstance of the romance are, if not scary, certainly creepy, especially at the end when -spoiler alert- ‘Duke’ Duquesne (Cesar Romero) confuses his daughter for his wife and tries to make the moves on her.

You see, Duke was a vaudeville magician and his wife, Melinda (also played by Connie Stevens) was his assistant. When she disappeared, he went into retirement, never knowing his daughter, Cassie. Years later, when Cassie is grown and the spitting image of her mother, she attends his funeral and learns she will be his sole heir if she spends a week in his old dark house until he returns from the grave to greet her.

Depending on your experience with such films, you know someone is going to try to drive Cassie from the house. It could be Duke’s press agent, ‘Buzz’ Sheridan (Parley Baer), or his devoted assistant, Dolly Bast (Virginia Gregg.) The inheritance will be split between them if Cassie doesn’t honor Duke’s wishes. They seem too obvious, though, especially when Val accuses them in strong fashion.

Could it be that Duke will return, performing the ultimate magic trick? Is his ghost haunting the house and Cassie? Or is something else rattling chains and otherwise causing things to go bump in the night? Two on a Guillotine is fun, just a little padded, which dilutes the suspense. The characters are likable and the actors portraying them appealing. Romero is perfect as the potentially diabolic magician.

Stevens is… pretty. Jones makes the movie lean toward comedy for me. Later that year, he’d be “discovered” by Disney and turn into one of their regular and most reliable stars after That Darn Cat! was successful. My favorite is Virginia Gregg, whose Dolly is a hot mess. She may sound familiar from another little thriller to which either William can only aspire…she was the voice of Mrs. Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960.)