“SUPREME MOMENT OF HORROR”
Soon nightfall darkens the scene at Pleasure Island and shadows its gloomy ruin. Jiminy now wandering alone through the debris and still calling out Pinocchio’s name, the camera zooms past him toward the desolate landscape’s only lighted structure, a distant poolhall in the shape of an eight ball with a towering cuestick alongside it. The contention that poolhalls had contributed to the delinquency of America’s youth reached its pinnacle in the 1957 Broadway musical The Music Man: “…Trouble and that starts with T and that rhymes with P and that stands for POOL!” – here anticipated by Disney nearly two decades earlier.
Inside, Lampwick is tutoring Pinocchio in the vices of smoking, drinking and frittering away time at the felt-lined table. The puppet has even started imitating his mentor’s manner of speaking, slurring his words out the side of his mouth.
Jiminy at last locates him but before he can talk any sense into Lampwick’s new apprentice, the adolescent miscreant himself remarks, “Y’mean ya take orders from a beetle?” and subjects the puppet’s conscience to various indignations including shooting his podium, the eight ball, in a called shot – “Screwball in the side pocket!” – down the hole cricket and all. The final straw though is Pinocchio’s request that Jiminy not hurt his new “best friend”. “Best friend?! And what am I?” responds the cricket, deeply wounded and furious. He turns tail and stalks out, muttering “Lampwick! Burns me up!”
Intent on exiting Pleasure Island ASAP but finding the entrance gate tightly shut, Jiminy pounds on it until he hears the pitiful braying of donkeys on the other side. He squeezes under it only to come face-to-face with a horrific sight on the other side. Commanded by the whip-wielding Coachman, huge shadowy goons are loading donkeys into crates for shipping off to the circus or worse yet the salt mines. One-by-one the Coachman interviews each donkey, still dressed in human clothing, asking demurely “And what’s your name?” If the response is a plaintive hee-haw, he rips the clothing off the poor creature, delivers it to a goon for crating, then turns his attention to the next. In this case, the donkey responds “Alexander” and gets shunted off into a rocky corner with others who can still speak.
“I want to go home to my mamma!” cries the donkey, whose pleading is echoed by the others, all still dressed in human clothing. The Coachman looming in shadow whips them into silence, growling “You’ve had your fun now pay for it!”
Witnessing all this, Jiminy is filled with terrified consternation, does an about-face and hastens back toward the poolhall…
…Wherein Lampwick is still shooting billiards and instructing Pinocchio in the further refinements of debauchery – shaming him to take a really big manly drag on his cigar. Which the puppet does, causing him to gush tears from his eyes and modulate through various unnatural skin tones into a sickly green.
Now comes what film historian, critic and professor of cinema arts William K. Everson (1929-1996) designates as “surely one of the screen’s supreme moments of horror.” Still shooting pool, Lampwick sprouts donkey ears.
Incredulous, Pinocchio flicks away his cigar. Bending over the table’s edge for another shot, Lampwick sprouts a tail. Pinocchio pushes his beer stein away. Referring to a remark of Jiminy’s, Lampwick muses, “What does he think I look like, a jackass?” Turning to face the puppet, the reprobate reveals his head now transformed entirely into that of a donkey. “You sure do!” says a gleeful Pinocchio, whose laughter devolves into braying. Amused, Lampwick remarks, “Hey, you laugh like a donkey!” His own mirth now expressed as a loud bray. “Did that come out of me?” he asks, feeling his ears in trepidation. He looks into a mirror and goes into shock, rampaging around room, claiming he’s been “framed”. Kneeling in front of Pinocchio and pleading for help, his clasped hands now turn into hooves. The transformation is complete when his cry for “Mamma!” gets punctuated with a snorting heehaw. Bucking riotously on all fours, he smashes a mirror and starts demolishing furniture. Now Pinocchio himself sprouts donkey ears which send him into a panic. Jiminy returns and immediately comprehends the situation. Pinocchio sprouts a tail. “Come on, before you get any worse,” urges the cricket and the two of them abandon the place, eventually to escape by diving off a high precipice into the sea.
