A commentary track for The Last House on the Left featuring the three actors of the male gang members – David Hess, Marc Sheffler and Fred Lincoln – appeared more than twenty years ago, I believe for the Region 2 Anchor Bay release of the DVD. It's a notable track, both for its content and for how little that content has been examined by DVD and Blu-ray reviewers.
I will be returning to that point in the future, but for now here's an example of what is on that track. Spoiler: this time there's a happy ending.
First, some background. About twenty minutes into the film, we see the drugged, bound and gagged Mari being kidnapped. She is carried over the shoulder of Krug, who runs to the waiting Cadillac and places her into the car's spacious trunk (boot if you're British like me) to join the already confined Phyllis. Krug does this reasonably carefully, after Sadie tells him not to hurt them. The trunk is closed, then the gang get quickly into the car and drive off towards the woods.
Sandra Peabody remembered that scene as part of her interview with Szulkin (p60) and had this to say about it:
One serious scene was where that guy put me over his shoulder, ran down a couple of flights of stairs and threw me into a car. Those guys were kind of mean to me when they did that... especially that method actor [Hess] who was trying to be mean all of the time.
(The clarification is Szulkin's.) "That guy" in this case is David Hess, as can be seen from the finished movie. Sandra doesn't expand on what "mean" refers to in this context. The term "serious scene" is also slightly odd given that pretty much all of Last House after the first few minutes is serious for Mari, but again Sandra doesn't expand.
David Hess also provides his recollections of the same scene:
I sprained my ankle going down that fire escape. [...] The scene was shot in downtown New York, not too far from the Fulton fish market. The fire escape itself was [...] really rickety and dangerous. When I think about the stuff I did, it's unbelievable! I could have been killed... but one didn't think about that.
The way Hess frames that comment, given what and who the scene involved, is very noticeable. As far as the movie itself goes, though, that would pretty much be that. What adds a new angle to it is Fred Lincoln's line on the commentary track, delivered as the car is driving away:
I thought we really pushed it because we really left 'em in the car till we got to Connecticut. But that was because we didn't have enough money to buy another car. We only had room for that many people.
On the face of it, this is an extraordinary comment by Lincoln. From the filming location, helpfully supplied by Hess, it is around twenty miles even to the Connecticut state line, let alone any of the woods locations within that state. Is he really saying that Sandra and Lucy Grantham were confined in a car trunk, bound and gagged, for an extended journey?
The answer, fortunately, is almost certainly no. Szulkin comes to the rescue with his Appendix III on pages 208 and 209. This provides us with Last House on the Left's shooting schedule, both the original plan for Night of Vengeance (the movie's shooting title) and, crucially, sound man Jim Hubbard's own diary of what actually happened during those few weeks in autumn 1971.
And if that diary is accurate, and there's no reason to suspect it isn't, then what Lincoln says could not have been true. Both planned and actual schedules are very clear that the Connecticut woods sequences were shot before the New York City apartment filming that included the fire escape scene. In fact, those particular New York scenes were done right at the end of shooting, with the exception of a "make-up day" in Westport.
It's not as if it would have been likely anyway. Transporting two bound women in a car trunk across state lines would be a ridiculous risk to run: quite apart from the physical dangers there were the enormous personal consequences of a patrol stop. A suspected federal kidnapping investigation could have brought the FBI down on the entire exploitation, underground and adult film industry – an industry that was trying very hard to avoid official attention, and was the place Fred Lincoln earned his living.
The obvious answer is that Lincoln was telling a very dry and, judging by the lack of laughter from Hess and Sheffler, not especially effective joke. The world in which Lincoln operated would certainly have seen gallows humour as routine, even if joking about this seems deeply uncomfortable to us today, especially when he had known Sandra for years.
What we can take from this is twofold. First, that not everything we see or hear is necessarily what actually happened, a point I will come back to. And second, that DVD commentary tracks of the early-mid 2000s were often performative "locker room" style spaces where the rules were loose and laddish behaviour was not merely tolerated but expected.
The most important point, however, is that Sandra and Lucy were not in fact endangered in the way that taking Fred Lincoln's words literally would have suggested.
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