By Erin Free
FilmInk salutes the work of creatives who have never truly received the credit that they deserve. In this installment: director Bert I. Gordon (pictured above, far right), who helmed The Food Of The Gods, Empire Of The Ants, Village Of The Giants and The Amazing Colossal Man.
There are many arguments that swirl around the concept of the cinematic auteur, particularly around the issues of quality, creative control and frequency of production. One principal factor in the identification of an auteur filmmaker, however, is the marking of consistent themes and stylistic beats; think Quentin Tarantino’s pop cultural obsessions and razor-sharp dialogue, Oliver Stone’s bullish, iconoclastic approach to cinema, John Ford’s love of The American West and its stunning vistas, Russ Meyer’s fixation on big breasts and hectic action, or Wes Anderson’s precise visual palette and quirky characters.
But if you want a filmmaker with an easily identifiable confluence of thematic interests, it’s hard to go past the late Bert I. Gordon. This director, to put it simply, liked to make monster movies about big things…giant sized bugs, enlarged animals, titanic humans, and anything else of massive scale that took his fancy. Gordon did detour into other areas throughout his lengthy career, but gigantism was his principal trip, and that’s where he received most of his attention. Based on his initials, Gordon was even coined Mr. B.I.G by pioneering sci-fi commentator Forest J. Ackerman in a moment of true inspiration.
“From the time I was a very young kid, I didn’t want to do anything but make movies the rest of my life,” Bert I. Gordon once said, and he built a successful career on his very singular interests. Though unquestionably a filmmaker with a certain level of notoriety and cult cache (his autobiography The Amazing Colossal Worlds Of Mr. B.I.G was published in 2010, and many of his films have been satirised on Mystery Science Theatre 3000), Bert I. Gordon still remains fairly obscure and certainly under-celebrated, which instantly qualifies him for Unsung Auteur status. “If the audience are supposed to scream in fright,” Gordon once said, “and the spider is sneaking up on its victim, and you’re waiting, waiting, and the sweat is building up, and all of a sudden, it happens, and they scream – that’s what it’s all about. I love it.”
Bertram Ira Gordon was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 1922, into a family of Russian Jewish descent who had no connection to the film industry. Gordon’s taste for filmmaking was truly piqued when he received a camera for his 13th birthday from his aunt, and began making 16mm short films. Gordon dropped out of college to join the military and served in World War II before moving into the world of television commercials. He later edited British feature films to fit half-hour time slots for American television, and by the 1950s had become a production assistant on the TV series Racket Squad and a camera operator on Serpent Island.
Bert I. Gordon made his big screen debut in 1957 with the statement-of-stylistic-intent that was King Dinosaur. A low budget sci-fi non-extravaganza, the film follows a group of astronauts who travel to a distant planet and battle giant insects, snakes, and the titular t-rex. Made in just seven days with only four actors and reams of stock footage, the film is a true feat of invention, with process screen special effects and various miniatures, all made with lashings of primitive charm. Gordon repeated the process on his next film, which was also churned out in a matter of days that same year. Though featuring a major star in Lon Chaney Jr., The Cyclops was similarly cheap, using rear projection to create giant mice, reptiles and birds, along with the eponymous creature, namely a mutated, 25-ft tall, one-eyed cyclops born out of exposure to radioactivity.
After his first two films, Bert I. Gordon teamed with noted exploitation house American International Pictures for a string of similarly themed and successful sci-fi/monster pics, including 1957’s The Amazing Colossal Man and its 1958 sequel War Of The Colossal Beast (about a military man who grows to an extraordinary 60 feet tall after being involved in a plutonium explosion), 1957’s Beginning Of The End (locusts eat huge mutated vegetables and become giant themselves), 1958’s Earth Vs The Spider (a town is menaced by a giant spider), and 1958’s Attack Of The Puppet People (in this one, the protagonists are shrunk to doll-size, and thus have to deal with suddenly giant-sized domestic animals and so forth). These are all fun, entertaining 1950s monster movie programmers made on low budgets and driven by Gordon’s vivid sense of imagination and canny knack for cobbling together cheaply constructed practical effects. They’re all economic in tone and tightly paced, and Gordon shows a flair for wonderfully unadorned storytelling and well-maintained suspense.
In the 1960s and then into the early 1970s, Gordon moved away from cinematic gigantism, and worked successfully on low budgets in a variety of other genres, turning out family adventure (1960’s The Boy And The Pirates), fantasy (1962’s The Magic Sword), a ghost story (1960’s Tormented), horror (1966’s Picture Mommy Dead, 1972’s Necromancy), and sex comedy (1970’s How To Succeed With Sex), even working with major stars like Don Ameche, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Basil Rathbone and Orson Welles, all with little money and on tight schedules. Gordon did, however, keep things big with his 1965 effort Village Of The Giants, a “beach party”-style exploitation flick in which a gang of rebellious teens (played by the likes of Beau Bridges, Ron Howard and Toni Basil!) ingest a chemical substance and then, yes, grow to gigantic proportions and proceed to terrorise their small hometown.
In the 1970s, Gordon directed two more essential giant-sized sci-fi/horror flicks, resulting in the rollicking, highly entertaining double-shot of 1976’s The Food Of The Gods (an HG Wells adaptation starring unlikely 1970s cult hero Marjoe Gortner as an ex-football player who rallies a disparate group of island-bound characters to fight off a horde of giant animals) and 1977’s Empire Of The Ants (more HG Wells, this time with Joan Collins, yes, Joan Collins, battling, you guessed it, giant ants). Featuring rattling action set-pieces, abundant jump-scares, unusual characters, and cheap-but-inventive special effects (process screens, models, and giant animal-head puppets abound), these are pulpy, drive-in flicks of the first garish order, and they represent a real thematic high-point for Bert I. Gordon, who enjoyably luxuriates in his love for all things extra-large.
In amongst this menagerie of massiveness, however, mention must be made of one of Bert I. Gordon’s best but most out-of-character films. In 1973, Gordon directed The Mad Bomber (aka Detective Geronimo aka The Police Connection), a highly unusual gritty urban thriller starring the wonderfully bullocking Vince Edwards as a near-crazed hard-bitten cop in pursuit of Chuck Connors’ serial bomber, who is in a perverse fit of rage induced by his daughter’s drug overdose. In a kinky twist, Edwards’ principal hope of catching the bomber is via Neville Brand’s creepy rapist, who witnessed him in action. With its multiple maniacs, high-level female nudity, lashings of sleaze, and air of true weirdness, The Mad Bomber feels like a film made by another director, but it’s a wonderfully salacious exploitation flick and an unlikely highlight on the resume of Bert I. Gordon.
The 1980s were not kind to Bert I. Gordon (though he did reveal another thematic interest via two MILF sex comedies in 1983’s Let’s Do It! and 1987’s The Big Bet), with the director leaving gigantism behind to focus on more regular-size horror in 1982’s Burned At The Stake and 1989’s Satan’s Princess. Bert I. Gordon kept it epic and outsized, however, not just by living to the age of 100, but by making his final film in 2015 at the age of 93 with the decidedly lurid Secrets Of A Psychopath. Bert I. Gordon passed away in 2023, long beloved in a small corner of the cult film community for his keen and abiding ability to, well, think big.
If you liked this story, check out our features on other unsung auteurs James Fargo, Jeremy Kagan, Robby Benson, Robert Hiltzik, John Carl Buechler, Rick Carter, Paul Dehn, Bob Kelljan, Kevin Connor, Ralph Nelson, William A. Graham, Judith Rascoe, Michael Pressman, Peter Carter, Leo V. Gordon, Dalene Young, Gary Nelson, Fred Walton, James Frawley, Pete Docter, Max Baer Jr., James Clavell, Ronald F. Maxwell, Frank D. Gilroy, John Hough, Dick Richards, William Girdler, Rayland Jensen, Richard T. Heffron, Christopher Jones, Earl Owensby, James Bridges, Jeff Kanew, Robert Butler, Leigh Chapman, Joe Camp, John Patrick Shanley, William Peter Blatty, Peter Clifton, Peter R. Hunt, Shaun Grant, James B. Harris, Gerald Wilson, Patricia Birch, Buzz Kulik, Kris Kristofferson, Rick Rosenthal, Kirsten Smith & Karen McCullah, Jerrold Freeman, William Dear, Anthony Harvey, Douglas Hickox, Karen Arthur, Larry Peerce, Tony Goldwyn, Brian G. Hutton, Shelley Duvall, Robert Towne, David Giler, William D. Wittliff, Tom DeSimone, Ulu Grosbard, Denis Sanders, Daryl Duke, Jack McCoy, James William Guercio, James Goldstone, Daniel Nettheim, Goran Stolevski, Jared & Jerusha Hess, William Richert, Michael Jenkins, Robert M. Young, Robert Thom, Graeme Clifford, Frank Howson, Oliver Hermanus, Jennings Lang, Matthew Saville, Sophie Hyde, John Curran, Jesse Peretz, Anthony Hayes, Stuart Blumberg, Stewart Copeland, Harriet Frank Jr & Irving Ravetch, Angelo Pizzo, John & Joyce Corrington, Robert Dillon, Irene Kamp, Albert Maltz, Nancy Dowd, Barry Michael Cooper, Gladys Hill, Walon Green, Eleanor Bergstein, William W. Norton, Helen Childress, Bill Lancaster, Lucinda Coxon, Ernest Tidyman, Shauna Cross, Troy Kennedy Martin, Kelly Marcel, Alan Sharp, Leslie Dixon, Jeremy Podeswa, Ferd & Beverly Sebastian, Anthony Page, Julie Gavras, Ted Post, Sarah Jacobson, Anton Corbijn, Gillian Robespierre, Brandon Cronenberg, Laszlo Nemes, Ayelat Menahemi, Ivan Tors, Amanda King & Fabio Cavadini, Cathy Henkel, Colin Higgins, Paul McGuigan, Rose Bosch, Dan Gilroy, Tanya Wexler, Clio Barnard, Robert Aldrich, Maya Forbes, Steven Kastrissios, Talya Lavie, Michael Rowe, Rebecca Cremona, Stephen Hopkins, Tony Bill, Sarah Gavron, Martin Davidson, Fran Rubel Kuzui, Elliot Silverstein, Liz Garbus, Victor Fleming, Barbara Peeters, Robert Benton, Lynn Shelton, Tom Gries, Randa Haines, Leslie H. Martinson, Nancy Kelly, Paul Newman, Brett Haley, Lynne Ramsay, Vernon Zimmerman, Lisa Cholodenko, Robert Greenwald, Phyllida Lloyd, Milton Katselas, Karyn Kusama, Seijun Suzuki, Albert Pyun, Cherie Nowlan, Steve Binder, Jack Cardiff, Anne Fletcher ,Bobcat Goldthwait, Donna Deitch, Frank Pierson, Ann Turner, Jerry Schatzberg, Antonia Bird, Jack Smight, Marielle Heller, James Glickenhaus, Euzhan Palcy, Bill L. Norton, Larysa Kondracki, Mel Stuart, Nanette Burstein, George Armitage, Mary Lambert, James Foley, Lewis John Carlino, Debra Granik, Taylor Sheridan, Laurie Collyer, Jay Roach, Barbara Kopple, John D. Hancock, Sara Colangelo, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Joyce Chopra, Mike Newell, Gina Prince-Bythewood, John Lee Hancock, Allison Anders, Daniel Petrie Sr., Katt Shea, Frank Perry, Amy Holden Jones, Stuart Rosenberg, Penelope Spheeris, Charles B. Pierce, Tamra Davis, Norman Taurog, Jennifer Lee, Paul Wendkos, Marisa Silver, John Mackenzie, Ida Lupino, John V. Soto, Martha Coolidge, Peter Hyams, Tim Hunter, Stephanie Rothman, Betty Thomas, John Flynn, Lizzie Borden, Lionel Jeffries, Lexi Alexander, Alkinos Tsilimidos, Stewart Raffill, Lamont Johnson, Maggie Greenwald and Tamara Jenkins.
