Night Tide (1961) on Netflix
NR19611h 26mDramaHorrorRomance
Sailor Johnny Drake, on leave in Santa Monica, meets Mora, who performs as a mermaid at a pier sideshow. Her previous boyfriends drowned, and Mora believes herself to be a siren.
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- Netflix3.8/5
- IMDb6.4/104,789 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes86%
Trailer
Plot summary
Mora works on the pier, appearing as Mora the Mermaid in a boardwalk sideshow run by Captain Murdock, her godfather, who took her in as an orphan on Mykonos. Johnny Drake, a sailor on leave in Santa Monica, meets her at a jazz club and comes to the attraction to see her. There he meets Ellen, whose father runs the merry-go-round, and she warns him that two of Mora's earlier boyfriends drowned. As the pair grow close, Mora says she thinks she is a siren, a creature of legend that draws sailors into the sea under the moon. A woman in black follows her, and Johnny puts Mora's talk down to a delusion rather than a threat.
Cast
- H.E. Westas Lt. Henderson
- Chainoas Head Bongo Player
- Kirby Allanas Bongo player
- Barbetteas Man Talking at Bar
- Danny Bestas Teen on Midway
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Night Tide (1961)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Before filming, director Curtis Harrington turned down an offer from the Mickey Cohen gang to finance Night Tide, joking that he feared he would end up at the bottom of the LA river in a block of cement if the film flopped.
- Filming Night Tide went smoothly until the last day, when Dennis Hopper got too drunk at lunchtime to finish his afternoon scenes and was involved in an accident; the rest of the scene had to be shot several weeks later.
- Harrington offered the role of Captain Murdock to Peter Lorre and Marcel Dalio, but both turned it down because of the low salary, and Gavin Muir was cast instead.
- The mermaid Mora was originally to be played by Susan Harrison, the lead of Sweet Smell of Success (1957); she first agreed, then pulled out after the person she was seeing at the time pushed her out of doing the film.
- Harrington mostly used a non-union crew, but shot one week with a union crew, the studio-built interiors such as Mora's apartment and the police station, because projectionists would otherwise refuse to screen a non-union film.
- When the production company Virgo defaulted on a $33,793 Pathé Lab loan, Roger Corman asked the lab to hold off foreclosing so his Filmgroup could distribute, guaranteeing Pathé $15,000 within 12 months of release.
- The Academy Film Archive restored Night Tide from the original negative in 2007, and the fan and director Nicolas Winding Refn later bought that negative from Curtis Harrington's estate and produced a 4K restoration released in 2020.
