He's going to be tough to handle. He's such a punk.
When TCM Underground aired its first Arch Hall, Jr. double feature back in 2006 (when the programming block was still brand new), it showed 1963's The Sadist first, followed by the previous year's Wild Guitar. This time around they did the reverse, leading off with the film that was Hall the Younger's follow-up to the infamous Eegah, which rightly got a grilling from the folks at Mystery Science Theater 3000. Wild Guitar would have been right up their alley as well since it's just as ineptly slapped together thanks to the efforts of director Ray Dennis Steckler (who pulls double duty as an actor under his Cash Flagg alias) and writers Arch Hall, Sr. (using the nom de plume Nicholas Merriwether) and Bob Wehling (who didn't think to hide behind a pseudonym). Hall the Elder also produced the film and co-stars (billed as William Watters) as a sleazy, cigar-chomping manager who takes full advantage of naïve guitarslinger Hall, Jr., a floppy-haired kid from South Dakota who rides into Hollywood on a motorcycle with a guitar, a suitcase and 15 cents to his name.
Naturally, the first person the kid meets is an up-and-coming dancer (Nancy Czar) who takes him along to a TV show she's appearing on and gets him a spot as a last-minute fill-in. And naturally he's an immediate sensation who gets swooped up by Hall, Sr. and set up in a swanky penthouse apartment with Steckler (playing a pistol-packing character named Steak) as his snotty minder. Hall the Elder is also quick to put Hall the Younger in his place, browbeating him into taking orders and overriding his objections to having paid fan-club presidents and the like, which makes me suspect some similar wrangling must have taken place behind the scenes between father and son. It's not all snazzy suits and eagle feathers, though (since the boy's character's name is Bud Eagle, it's decided that his gimmick will be eagle feathers), as junior learns when he has a run-in with drunk has-been Robert Crumb (no, not that Robert Crumb), who's already been through the mill. It's an object lesson he takes to heart.
As one would expect from such a meeting of the minds, Wild Guitar is chock full of tone-deaf choices and oddball moments. For example, every scene with the trio of penny-ante comic-relief hoods that decides to kidnap Hall, Jr. once he's a hot property is so painfully unfunny you won't believe it. And there's a curiously poetic scene when Czar takes him ice skating at a rink which is closed, but still has a follow-spot operator on the clock. My favorite "why the fuck not?" detail, though, is when we meet his downstairs neighbor Stella and hear her husband Stanley's weak Brando impression. I don't know who decided to throw in a random Streetcar Named Desire reference at that moment, but I'm very glad they did. I'm also glad the Halls and Steckler gave Hungarian cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond his first job after coming to Hollywood -- he's credited with second unit photography under the name William Zsigmond, which he used off and on over the next decade until he started getting steady work on films that he wouldn't be embarrassed to sign his real name to.
The following year, Vilmos Zsigmond was promoted to full-fledged director of photography on The Sadist, which is about the only time Arch Hall, Jr. was ever truly effective on screen. Written and directed by James Landis, the film is about a trio of schoolteachers (ex-army mechanic Richard Alden, prim and proper Helen Hovey, proud family man Don Russell) whose car breaks down on the way to a Dodgers game, forcing them to pull into an out-of-the-way repair shop that's seemingly abandoned. Alden sets about procuring a replacement fuel pump, but it isn't long before a clearly psychotic Hall appears with his submoronic girlfriend (Marilyn Manning) in tow to terrorize and humiliate them at gunpoint. It's a simple set-up, but Landis wrings the maximum amount of suspense out of the situation, extracting a chilling performance from Hall in the process.
Screwing up his face into a permanent sneer, Hall plays the title role to a T. As one half of a pair of "thrill killers" (patterned after Charles Starkweather and Caril Fugate, who later served as the models for the main characters in Terrence Malick's Badlands), Hall is unhinged without going over the top, which he very easily could have done. And Landis pulls no punches, picking the exact right moment for Hall to show that he means business. (You'll know it when you see it.) He also pulls off the neat trick of having the action play out very close to real time without drawing too much attention to it. Pity he failed to capitalize on the promise he showed here.