Robert Clarke 1920- By Barry Brown Robert died 11 June 2005 in Valley Village, California (complications from diabetes)

While John Agar and Richard Carlson competed in a dead heat for the ultimate personification of the classic science-fiction movie hero – the sharp, no-nonsense scientist or military man – Robert Clarke, in a series of low-budget sci-fi quickies, carved out his own unique position. His heroes had the same qualities of mature decisiveness, but nearly every one was combined with a boyish amiability that distinctively softened their tone and image. With Agar and Carlton (and their less ubiquitous counterparts, Richard Denny and Robert Hutton) one rarely felt camaraderie. Clark’s bastion of individuality in fantasy films was his ingenuousness, a quality perhaps better suited to non-horror pictures like Ida Lupino’s Hard, Fast and Beautiful, but which Clarke himself parlayed to advantage when he produced, directed and starred in his most famous film, The Hideous Sun Demon.

Robert Irby Clarke was born June 1, 1920 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma to William Arthur Clarke, an oilman who had at one time toyed with the idea of being an actor, and his wife, the former Genevieve Irby. Young Robert, the eldest of three children, began acting in high school plays at Classen High, appearing in several opposite Mary Francis Heflin, younger sister of actor Van Heflin. Later, the two again appeared in several productions at the University of Oklahoma.

Bob had caught the acting bug from watching movies. He was particularly enthralled with the work of Douglas Fairbanks and, years later, he himself was to star as a number of the classic swashbuckling heroes, including D’Artagnan, Robin Hood and the Count of Monte Cristo.

After graduation from high school, Clarke spent a year at Kemper Military School in Booneville, Missouri, one of the oldest military schools in the country (Will Rogers had been a student there in the 1890s). Then, he enrolled at the University of Oklahoma where, with an ever-practical eye to the vagaries of his by-now-chosen career, he majored in Business Administration and minored in Speech. One summer he had the good fortune to work with Gertrude Johnson, a Speech professor from the University of Wisconsin, who had at one time coached Fredric March. She recognized that young Clarke was serious about pursuing an acting career and alerted him to the fact that he’d best rid himself of his Oklahoma accent and gain mastery over General American speech.

And so Clarke journeyed north, entering the University of Wisconsin, working meanwhile in a cafeteria and as a window-washer. Gertrude Johnson helped him get a job on the campus radio station at forty cents an hour. For a year he worked only on sound effects while in classes he strived to conquer his accent.

In 1941, a friend who worked on commercial radio station WIBU in Madison was joining the Air Force and the station needed a replacement. Bob had his friend set up an audition. The result: Clark’s first professional job as an entertainer. With a daily one-hour time slot, he functioned as disc jockey and newsman, receiving a grand total of fifteen dollars a week. To Clarke, the fifteen was like fifteen hundred; he’d triumphed over his provincial speech. Years later he noted, however, that another alumnae of Classen High, one Dale Robertson, found television success with the aid of his regional pronunciations.

After a tenure at WIBU, Bob worked at the one network station in Madison, WIBA, an NBC affiliate. Meanwhile, at the University, Clarke was finally coming into his own: he won the school accolade for Best Actor for his performance in the University of Wisconsin Players’ production of English dramatist Gerald Savory’s 1937 play, George and Margaret.

After graduation from UW in 1942, Clarke was employed by the U.S. Army Signal Corps stationed in Chicago as an Associate Inspector of Radio Material (being an asthmatic, he was turned down for officers’ training). He would visit various manufacturing plants, testing certain electronic equipment. When technology crept up with his job, however, Bob was without employment and he returned to Oklahoma in the summer of ’43. But not for long.

Within a year Bob Clarke began his life’s career in Hollywood. When a friend who was a member of the U.S. Army embarked in an automobile journey from Oklahoma to California to keep an appointment with the Pacific theatre of operations, Bob went along, sharing the gasoline bill. Not only did he rationalize the trip on the grounds that southern California would provide a more amicable atmosphere for his asthma, but an old school-chum of his father’s, Gus Corder, was now a Hollywood actors’ agent. Armed with a letter of introduction from his father, Clarke was able to retain Corder as his representative. Corder arranged for a reading with executives at 20th Century Fox who were impressed enough in these war years when many of their already-established leading men were in the service, to offer Clarke a screen test. The test, done opposite Debra Paget, was a bomb. Said Clarke: “It was terrible. She was fine, but I was awful… You can laugh about it now, but (at the time) it was just lousy.” The scene concerned a middle-aged man who was losing his wife to cancer. The wardrobe department fit the twenty-three year old Clarke with a smoking jacket tailored for George Sanders (whose arms were considerably longer) and, to correct the overlap of the sleeves, pads used on slope-shouldered Don Ameche were employed. “So here”, Clarke laughingly recalled, “I had this body pad and this big coat and the first thing you see on the screen, I remember: my head was so small for the rest of me it was just awful and (I was) miscast and the acting wasn’t all that great anyway.”

The test was such a flop that Clarke found it necessary to change agents. He was fortunate enough to get a prestigious firm, the Frank Vincent office, to represent him (Vincent, at the time, represented luminaries like Cary Grant, Rita Hayworth and Rosalind Russell) and an ambitious sub-agent, Frank Horne, who took him to Columbia. But Bob’s second screen test, for a $150. a week stock contract, fizzled also. The studio combined screen tests with allowing dialogue directors to audition their own talents through direction of the tests. Four men were to be tested for three stock contracts and Clarke was scheduled as the last. Naturally, each dialogue director made an elaborate-as-possible production of the test to prove his directorial prowess. Bob’s test was set to begin shooting at 1:30 in the afternoon; he arrived at noon and by 1:30 they were still on the second test. By three o’clock they had managed to reach the third. When the time for Clarke’s turn came round it was 5:15 and the crew had to be out by six. Max Arno, then head-of-casting, came down on the set to raise hell and ordered Clark’s scene to be filmed expeditiously, with no intricate blocking. The camera was simply to move in, with Bob placed awkwardly on the corner of a couch and his co-star, Ann Savage, already a contract player, virtually excluded. Needless to say, Clark’s three competitors were signed, he was not.

His streak of bad luck ended, however, with his own efforts to recover. The Columbia rejection was a sad day, particularly as it had been so arbitrary (the same practice continues regularly in today’s Hollywood, to the loss of tens of thousands of dollars for those innocents who finance such projects). After this second setback, a downbeaten actor read that the Geller Workshop Theatre, located at Fairfax and Wilshire (where a department store now stands) was casting for the lead in their next production, When Ladies Meet. Bob went in, read, and got the part. To his consternation, however, the agreement was ‘pay to play’ – in order to play the lead in the production, Clarke was to pay sixty dollars a month. In effect, the school was one of the earlier Hollywood theatre rackets that today are allowed to function virtually unfettered by the government regulators. In Bob’s day, with Hollywood talent scouts who frequented smaller theatres a living reality, excuses can be made for the actual fraud that was and is commonplace with such establishments. Clarke himself refers to his sixty-dollar payment as “one of the best investments I ever made.”

RKO dramatic scout (and former actor) Don Dillaway saw Bob in When Ladies Meet, set up a meeting with RKO dramatic coach Lillian Albertson and, on the strength of his reading for her, she recommended Clarke be signed to a standard seven-year contract with the studio, beginning at $4,000. a year. Thirty days before Clarke was signed, an actor named Robert Mitchum had been hired on the same deal.

Bob’s first film role was an assistant director in The Falcon in Hollywood (1944); the first film in which he had much to do, however, was a 1945 Tim Holt western, Wanderer of the Wasteland, in which Bob played the wayward brother of Audrey Long.

Between ’45 and ’47, Clarke worked in over a score of RKO releases, including several other Tim Holt Westerns, a small role as a soldier in Back to Bataan in which, along with fellow contract-player Bill Williams, he had the backbreaking assignment of lifting John Wayne out of a slip-trench; and did his first parts in the horror genre. The first of this latter category was Zombies on Broadway, starring the late comics Wally Brown and Alan Carney as a couple of press agents who are forced to produce a real zombie for the opening of a night club called The Zombie Hut. Bob had a bit as a radio broadcaster. In The Body Snatcher, he had a few lines as Richardson, one of Henry Daniell’s medical students. Another bit in a Brown-Carney vehicle, Genius at Work, was distinguished only because he was able to work with and observe Lugosi. Finally, in Bedlam, a Val Lewton production starring Boris Karloff and directed by Mark Robson, he received a part he could sink his teeth into, playing Dan the Dog, a demented young man, one of the inmates of the famous London asylum of the eighteenth century. To research his role, which remains one of his favourites, Clarke visited the Metropolitan State Hospital in Norwalk, California (where, years later, Bela Lugosi was to stay while kicking the drug habit).

Though these roles, for the most part, with Bedlam a notable exception, Clarke had managed to work with the two top horror stars of the day. Karloff he remembers with admiration for the man’s humility and friendliness. He autographed a picture to Clarke that said “Be as lucky as I am.” Lugosi, he recalls, was distant and spent much of his time napping.

Bob spent three years under contract to RKO, acting in various roles, the largest ones being in Westerns. After RKO declined to pick up their option on his services, Clarke was advised by his business manager, Beatrice Halstead, to go to New York.

In the summer of 1947, Clarke piled his clothes in a car and drove East. The seven-day trip to New York City was not uneventful: he burned out four voltage regulators, two batteries and a generator. It wasn’t long after he arrived, however, that he landed his first job, with a road company revival of What Price Glory?, starring Brian Donlevy and Regis Toomey. But the show closed after a miserable two week run in snowstorm-ridden Detroit. Returning to New York, Bob went through a long period of unemployment, broken only by occasional jobs as a radio actor, fasion and dramatic model for magazines and actor in training films for the Signal Corps. Then, at one particular low point, he accepted an evening job as a soda jerk in a store next to the RKO-Keith Theatre in Flushing, New York. One week Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome played the theatre and Bob had to endure the questions of theatre patrons who recognized him and wondered why he was there.

In the summer of 1948, after a brief return to California during which time he acted two days in a Columbia release, Ladies of the Chorus (another bit player in the film was Marilyn Monroe), Clarke’s fortunes improved. He landed a job as resident leading man in summer stock at the Newport Casino Theatre in Newport, Rhode Island. He received fifty dollars a week working such shows as John Loves Mary, Peg O’ My Heart, Parlour Story and Fatal Weakness, playing juvenile or romantic lead to the one star who would be brought in as guest performer from show to show.

After the excellent summer experience with its demanding schedule, a revitalized Clarke returned to New York and was soon cast as a replacement for the understudy of a part that actor Richard Hylton was doing in the Broadway produced of Ferenc Molnar’s The Play’s the Thing, starring Louis Calhern and Faye Emerson. The play had been running nearly five months when Clarke was hired. After only two rehearsals with the other understudies, Clark was thrust into a maddening position. Hylton gave notice of his intention to leave, then stayed for but three more performances rather than the general two weeks afforded an understudy to replace a principal. Clarke was given one rehearsal with the main company before he went on. The first act, he recalls, was one of the most frightening experiences of his life, but all went fine and the play’s run extended for several more months, eventually closing in Philadelphia in January, 1950.

By then, Clarke had had his fill of New York and he journeyed back to Los Angeles. It was a propitious move, for shortly after his return he landed a role on an episode of the radio show, Anacin Star Theatre. The format of the show had a star (in this case Bob’s old friend Brian Donlevy) introduces a newcomer who would play the lead in the show. The scriptwriter was a woman named Martha Wilkerson and it is to her that Bob Clarkes owes his biggest break.

‘Marty’ Wilkerson was, at the time, involved in writing a script for actress turned director Ida Lupino, who had a three-picture deal with RKO. The previous year, Lupino had co-produced and co-scripted a story about a would-be actress who becomes an unwed mother, a controversial topic for that period of moral hypocrisy. Now she was planning another risqué picture about an exclusively female problem, rape. Outrage was to be directed by Ms. Lupino herself from a script by Collier Young and Jerry Wald’s younger brother, Malvin. Ms. Wilkerson, meanwhile, was working on a third script for a female lead, but in the meantime, having been impressed with Clarke’s work with her radio scripts, set up a reading for him for the second male lead, the victimized girls’ fiancé, in Outrage. Bob went in and, following a short rehearsal with dialogue director Don Weis (who later made a modest name for himself as a movie and television director) read for Lupino, who cast him on the spot.

To this film and to his second appearance for Lupino in the subsequent Martha Wilkerson script, Hard, Fast and Beautiful (1951), concerning the hard-driving mother of a young pro tennis player, Clarke attributes his marked run as a B movie leading man, a lucky streak that extended from 1950 through 1955 and which, after a severe three year slump, was revived on a smaller level from ’58 through ’62.

Between the two Lupino films, Clarke co-starred in a minor Monogram release, Modern Marriage (1950), the sole significance of which as its first pairing of him with Margaret Field*, who was to be his leading lady in the first two science-fiction films in which he starred.

*Now the wife of former screen Tarzan Jock Mahoney, Field is the mother, by a previous marriage, of actress Sally Field.

Shortly after Clarke completed his work in Hard, Fast and Beautiful, he was tipped by scriptwriter Malvin Wald that two enterprising writer-producers named Jack Pollexfen and Aubrey Wisberg were casting about for an actor to play the lead in their low-budget project The Man from Planet X. Without consulting his agent, Bob set up an appointment, read for and captured the role. Margaret Field got the leading lady assignment.

The Man from Planet X concerns the appearance of a strange being on a remote island near the coast of Scotland. The alien is from a planet that is perishing from an onslaught of icy temperatures. ‘The Man’ is a scout sent ahead to pave a way on Earth for his people. He is at first befriended by an elderly scientist (Raymond Bond) and newspaperman Clarke whom Bond, upon his discovery of planet X nearing the Earth, has called to the scene. But an unscrupulous scientist (William Schallert), in an attempt to gain scientific secrets, enrages the creature who then uses hypnosis to manipulate the locate residents into a personal army. Bond and his daughter (Field) are taken captive and it remains for Clarke to alert the military and, ultimately, to rescue his friends. Then, in a burst of xenophobia, the creature is destroyed.

Clarke worked the picture for union scale, one hundred seventy five dollars a week. With overtime accounted for, he made a little over two hundred dollars for the entire picture. Filmed in six days at the Hal Roach studios, using the same sets originally built for the production of Joan of Arc that starred Ingrid Bergman, The Man From Planet X went on to gross over a million dollars in domestic profits alone and won Pollexfen and Wisberg a three-picture contract with RKO, in all three of which Clarke was cast. Even the sets continued to render a profit, being reused in several other pictures featuring Clarke.

Shortly after his science fiction debut, Bob starred in several costume dramas, one of which, Swords of the Musketeers, he avers to be the first motion picture shot ostensibly for release to television. Clarke played D’Artagnan in this low-budget (less than $25,000) version of the Dumas story that was eventually given theatrical distribution by Lippert. That film resulted in his being signed to a one year contract with Hal Roach during which time he was cast in another early made-for-tv movie, Tales of Robin Hood, playing the forest rogue of the title. It, too, was released theatrically when it failed to sell as a television series. Both movies were shot in four days and employed the Joan of Arc sets.

In 1952, Bob starred in the Pollexfen-Wisberg team’s second picture, a futuristic fantasy originally titled 3000AD, but released as Captive Women, again with Maggie Field as lead female. Taking place in a New York City obliterated through atomic warfare where a tribute of normal survivors of the holocaust conflict with peace-loving mutations, Captive Women had Clarke and Ron Randell representing the respective good and evil leaders of the normal tribe, now living in caves and apparelled in animal skins. The picture, as Clarke remembers it “was overwhelming for a director, in a sense, because it had so much trick stuff involved…avalanches they had to rig, and on a set, that’s difficult.” The director, Stuart Gilmore, who had previously been a film editor, “had an almost impossible job to bring that in under the conditions and for the time (allotted).” It was shot in six to eight days.

Following Captive Women, Bob did two other pictures for Pollexfen and Wisberg, playing the Count of Monte Cristo in Sword of Venus (1953) and co-starring with Anthony Dexter, of ‘Valentino’ fame, in Captain John Smith and Pocohantas the same year.

Gradually, however, work became scarce. In 1954, the only feature work to come his way was a supporting role in The Black Pirates, with Lon Chaney, Jr., and an unbilled bit in a montage sequence with Greer Garson in Her Twelve Men. That was followed by a supporting role in one of the last serials ever made, King of the Carnival, with Harry Lauter in the lead. Clark’s thread of good luck was at an end. From then on, what success he had as a film actor was the result of his own initiative.

It was around this time that Clarke met, through singer Larry Cotton, his wife-to-be, Alyce King de Azevedo, a widow with two sons, Alexis and Ric, who was a celebrity in her own right as one of the six singing King Sisters. They were married March 31, 1956. By this time, Clarke had become a life underwriter for the Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company. Having majored in economics in college, it seemed the logical thing to do. “To me acting was fun, it was something I enjoyed”, he explained. “I didn’t necessarily want to give it up, but I knew that to really live as we wanted to live, with a certain amount of security, it behoved me to go into business, which I did.”

Yet Bob continued to work at his first love and the future was to see his virtually complete return to the profession. For a time he accepted tiny roles, sandwiching them inbetween his more mundane insurance job. Unbilled bits in films such as The Benny Goodman Story, Band of Angels and The Deep Six were the only parts to come his way, though he did receive billing in a small role in the 1957 David Niven-June Allyson comedy remake of 1936’s My Man Godfrey that had originally featured William Powell and Carole Lombard.

But, in 1957, his luck began to change. In the space of a few short months, Clarke found himself in demand for a whole new type of picture – the shoestring-budget exploitation quickie. Though they were a step down from anything he’d done heretobefore, the four films he made nearly back to back in ’57 not only recharged his career and inspired Bob to become his own producer, they led the way in establishing for him a firm position as a sci-fi star.

One day in ’57 Clarke visited National Screen Service, the major manufacturer of film exhibition material, to purchase posters from some of his own films. While there, he made the acquaintance of a NSS trailer editor, Ronnie Ashcroft, who was planning to direct several low-budget pictures of his own and soon talked Clarke into starring in both of them. The first was Girl with an Itch, a suggestive but tame melodrama about a buxom farmgirl featuring Robert Armstrong (Carl Denham of King Kong) as Clarke’s father. The second, The Astounding She Monster, left a germ of an idea in Clark’s mind that, by the fall of the same year, had crystallized.

The Astounding She Monster was shot in five days at a small studio on Larchmont Boulevard in Los Angeles at a cost of less than $20,000. Bob was paid five hundred dollars for his work and given a contract entitling him to four per cent of the net profit that eventually earned him over two thousand dollars, which Ashcroft conscientiously delivered. Briefly, the story unravels as a meteor crashes to Earth in the Sierra mountains and from it emerges a strange, glowing, female alien (Shirley Kilpatrick) who promptly causes an automobile containing three criminals (Keane Duncan, Ewing Brown, Jeanne Tatum) and their hostage (the late Marilyn Harvey) to crash. They take refuge inside a ski lodge inhabited by scientist Dick Cutler (Clarke) where they are followed by the she-monster. Eventually, the three ne’er-do-wells falls victim to radium poisoning inflicted by the alien who is in turn destroyed by a bomb concocted by Clarke that manages to eat away the monster’s protective coating.

Necessity is the mother of invention and during the hurried shooting schedule of She Monster unforeseen events tested Ashcroft’s ingenuity. One of the more interesting touches in an otherwise mediocre picture is the habit the she-monster has of backing away to make an exit, rather than turning around and running off. This came about when, during the first day of shooting, the skin-tight costume Shirley Kilpatrick wore to represent the alien’s glowing shield of immunity split up the back when she bent over. Ashcroft wasn’t fazed in the least, Clarke recalls. He simply made the decision to shoot her only from the front. Later, when the time came to photograph a scene where the she-monster bursts through a plate-glass window at the ski lodge, the workmen who were setting in place the fake glass-piece, made of spun sugar, dropped it, shattering a great part. There wasn’t time to order another, so Ashcroft used the biggest piece left and filmed the crash-thru from a discreet angle.

Around the same time the Ashcroft pictures were being made, Clarke came into contact with another new producer-director, Jerry Warren, who in time was to establish himself as the undisputed king of cheap horror films. When Bob met him, Warren had not yet begun to do the type of mish-mash film for which he became notorious, in which he would interpolate footage from foreign action or horror films with garrulous scenes with American actors that he wrote and shot himself. At this point in his career, Jerry was intent on making his own features. Previously, he’d made one film, Manbeast, concerning the Yeti or abominable snowman of the Himalayas. His next effort with The Incredible Petrified World, for which he secured the services of Clarke and John Carradine.

Bob describes Warren as “an indefatigable worker…he did it all. He wrote it, produced it and directed it.” Again, Clarke was paid five hundred dollars for one week’s work. The majority of the film was shot on location in the underground caverns of Tucson, Arizona. Clarke played Craig Randall, a diving expert who, when a cable snaps while he is testing an experimental diving bell designed by oceanographer Carradine, is trapped at the bottom of the sea along with a colleague (Allen Windsor), a woman reporter (Phyllis Coates) and a college student (Sheila Noonan). Eventually, they happen upon a maze of underground caves where it looks as though they will be spending the rest of their lives. They meet up with the sole inhabitant, a grizzled old degenerate (Maurice Bernard) named Ingol, who long ago became lost with his companion, whom he later killed and ate. It is his plan to keep the college girl and kill her friends, but a volcanic eruption disposes of him and our heroes narrowly escape death themselves, fortunately finding their way out from the lower depths to be rescued.

When Clarke reported on location for shooting, he later recalled, “I was astounded…He (Warren) had a cameraman and a soundman and that’s all! The soundman would ask one of us actors who were not in the scene to hold the boom to record.” But Clarke was equally amazed at the acceptable quality of the footage Warren was getting, despite his bare-boned budget. And when, shortly after, he starred in another Warren epic, Terror of the Bloodhunters, as Steven Duval, an artist unjustly imprisoned in a jungle prison similar to Devil’s Island, Clarke saw Warren doing the same thing: using a bit of stock footage and a great deal of cheap location-shooting. In this case, the jungle was Griffith Park in Los Angeles and Topanga Canyon, not far removed.

And so it was, with the experience of these four pictures, that Bob began to reflect: “To make more out of it myself, and since they’re starring me, I’ll make my own.” And thus begins the story of the film for which Bob Clarke is best remembered, The Hideous Sun Demon.

With the idea of doing his own film firmly planted, Bob set about learning how to do it. He paid a visit to old friend Malvin Wald, who was teaching a class in screenwriting at University of Southern California. He suggested Clarke take a course in film editing as a means of not only preparing himself for the project, but as a way of meeting students who would be interested in participating. Following his advice, Bob did join a class and immediately began recruiting. Among his enlistments from the USC student body were photographer Vilos Lapieneks, later to become one of the most sought-after independent cameramen, editor Tom Boutross and writer E.S. Seely, Jr. Seely turned out a script from a story by Clarke and Phil Hiner that gave a novel twist to the Jekyll-Hyde plot.

Scientist Gilbert McKenna, during the course of his experimentations, exposes himself to excessive amounts of radioactivity which results in his becoming allergic to sunlight. Unlike the creatures who come out to haunt the night, McKenna becomes a monster when the sun comes up, turning into a scaly, lizard-like creature with a bent for destruction. Though he learns from his doctor that he must remain out of the sunlight indefinitely until a cure for his malady can be discovered, McKenna gets involved in a series of unfortunate nighttime episodes that leave him groggily exposed to the dawn. After several innocent murders, the well-meaning researcher becomes a hunted animal and the end comes when he is cornered by the police at the top of a large watertank, from whence he plunges to his death.

“Basically, we wanted to take something we thought would be commercially successful”, Clarke later said. A science fiction story seemed the safest bet. Seely’s script was re-written by Clarke and Doane Hoag and the picture, financed entirely by Clarke and another fellow he’d met at USC, Robin Kirkman, was projected at a cost of twenty thousand dollars. But by the time it was completed it had cost thirty-five thousand, all of which came from the pockets of Clarke and Kirkman. “They say that’s one of the cardinal rules of the picture business,” says Clarke. “Don’t use your own money. And I found out why.”

Using a non-union crew from USC, paying union scale to the actors with Clarke both directing and playing the lead, The Hideous Sun Demon was shot in 35 mm. on twelve weekends, or 24 days, over a period of four months. During that time, Clark’s son, Cameron, who had been born in November 1957, about a month before filming began, nearly died from an incarcerated hernia and Bob’s father did in fact pass away following a brain tumor operation. Save for the understandable hiatus caused by these crises, each Friday afternoon Kirkman would rent the lighting and camera equipment for the weekends’ shooting and little by little the diligent group of film-makers put together a movie.

For the exterior shots of the terraced hospital where Clarke first turns into the sun demon the former home of silent screen star Antonio Moreno, which by then had been converted to a school for Catholic girls, was used. Most of the interiors were shot in a home, since torn down, formerly seen in the series I Led Three Lives, for the use of which Clarke paid the owners the remarkably low sum of fifteen dollars a day.

The chest and head suit Clarke wore as the hideous sun demon was designed by USC makeup artist Dick Casserino (who, besides appearing as a cop in the film also aided in the direction of the monster sequences, adopting the screen name Gianbatista Casserino). Originally, Bob had asked the great monster makeup artist Jack Pierce to recommend someone and Pierce had suggested Jack Kevan who, with Bud Westmore, had worked on Creature from the Black Lagoon, but Clarke found Kevan’s mild estimate of fifteen thousand dollars for the monster suit prohibitive. As it turned out, Casserino’s work served its purpose well, though the suit was horribly uncomfortable and, doing all his own running and jumping, Bob perspired horribly, or hideously as the case may be. “The funniest part of it was”, he remembered, “the more I perspired – the perspiration had to go some place – (so) it went down into my pants and in two or three shots it looked like I was looking for a bathroom and couldn’t find it.”

When the picture was completed, with a score purchased from the Capitol Record Library and a song, “Strange Pursuit”, sung by Bob’s sister-in-law, Marilyn King, the question of distribution came up. Screening it for Samuel Arkoff and the late James Nicholson of American International, Clarke found them interested in the piece, but only on their terms. Bob wanted a deal wherein the distributor would agree to finance another picture. To this, the men of AIP demurred and so he began to shop about for a distributor who would agree to a production deal. Shortly after, he found one.

Les Guthrie, an old acquaintance of Bob’s who’d been a production manager on films such as The Man from Planet X and Tales of Robin Hood, was now working for an independent production company on a crime drama called Date with Death. He called Clarke in for an acting role and the consequent meeting with the producers of the film was so successful that Bob not only found himself with another lead role, but a distributor for Hideous Sun Demon and a three-picture deal to boot. Michael Miller and John Miller (no relation) were entering the movie business with Date with Death, about a wanderer mistaken for a New York cop, who is sworn in as police chief of a small town and proceeds to clean up the rackets. It co-starred Clarke with the late Gerald Mohr and stripper Liz Renay. The Millers agreed to double-bill Sun Demon and Date with Death and soon Bob was casting about for his next project, to be financed by them.

Through his manager, Clarke located a script by science fiction author Arthur C. Pierce called Beyond the Time Barrier. Budgeted at $125,000., it became the company’s next project, with Clarke starring and functioning as producer.

Beyond the Time Barrier told the story of Air Force Major William Allison who, while testing a new rocket engine, literally crashes into the future of 2024 where, as the result of nuclear tests in 1971, the Earth as we know it is decimated. A cosmic plague has driven the populace underground where they are divided into two camps – the sterile and the mutant. There is no permanent escape from the plague. By the end of the picture, Clarke manages to crash back to 1960 to warn the Earth’s leaders of the doom they are pursuing, but the time warp finally catches up with him and he suddenly turns into an ancient man via a superior wrinkled rice-paper makeup job by Jack Pierce, creator of the classic Frankenstein, Wolfman and Mummy makeups of the thirties and forties. Man from Planet X director Edgar Ulmer was brought in to helm Time Barrier and it was completed on a two-week schedule in Dallas, Texas. Clarke was paid two thousand dollars for his work in the picture and given a six per cent stake in the profits.

The Miller-Clarke partnership, however, proved not to be what it was originally intended. Not long after Beyond the Time Barrier was completed, the Millers, at the suggestion of promoter Kroger Babb, invested an enormous amount of money in a giant giveaway contest they hoped would serve as a launching pad for their distributing outfit. The stunt failed and the company filed bankruptcy, taking with it all of Clarke’s percentage in Time Barrier and his ownership (with the exception of television rights) of Hideous Sun Demon. American International bought, for the cost of lab fees, Beyond the Time Barrier and released it for a tidy profit. The bottom line on Hideous Sun Demon is disgusting. Clarke had invested twenty-five thousand dollars in ordering one hundred prints of that film, which he then turned over to the Millers for distribution. Without Clark’s knowledge or approval, the Millers sold the prints outright to theatre owners. Clarke saw not one dime from its domestic or foreign theatrical distribution. He resisted suing the Millers because he needed their signatures when it came to selling the tv rights, when he did eventually for fifteen thousand dollars. The film reverts to Clark’s ownership every few years and he re-sells it, but it is only now, nearly twenty years later, that he is reaching the line of profit on his original investment.

After being burned so badly, Bob had had it with the production end of pictures. As for acting, he played one final lead in a low-budget Crown International release, Secret File-Hollywood (1962), opposite one of the more alluring starlets of the early sixties, Francine York (star of two cheap horror films, Space Monster and Curse of the Swamp Creature). The his feature film career dwindled away with small parts in films like The Lively Set (1964) and Zebra in the Kitchen (1965), his last to date.

Clarke’s interest turned to television. All along, during his feature career, Bob had done television work, appearing in most of the major shows. Episodes of I Led Three Lives, Wagon Train, Gunsmoke, Dragnet, Doctor Kildare and, more recently, Marcus Welby, M.D., Ironside, The Mod Squad and Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law are all among his credits. In 1962, Yvonne King wrote and produced a two hour variety show featuring the King Sisters. Response to the show was enormous and enthusiastic and led to a weekly variety show broadcast over the ABC network, The King Family Show, featuring nearly the entire King Family tree. Bob, who has never taken professional singing lessons in his life, but managed to develop a beautiful bass baritone while a youth out of admiration for Orson Welles, participated in each show throughout its two season run and later functioned as an associate producer of the twelve holiday specials featuring the King Sisters, Maxine, Louise, Alyce, Donna, Yvonne and Marilyn. Later, when a half-hour version of the show appeared briefly in 1969, Bob again made forays as a singer. His own special offering was a recitative, “My Little Girl’s Life”, which became a staple of the King Family act.

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