Here's my mate Neil Frost (and a reflection of Dan Lees) giving a hint of what clowns have been up to in the Plague Year. And, rounding off this review of my favourite or at least more conspicuous posts from the last twelve months, below is the door to my own socially-distanced December nonsense, and the last video I made this year. All things considered I've had a very lucky Twenty-Twenty, or as the French would say "happy", and regularly putting something out has definitely helped the happy happen so thanks, ole unattendees, for your kind attention, and here's to Twenty-Plenty-Fun. Party responsibly. Let's all keep behind our panels. Tomorrow there might be a quiz.
A nice plug in the Guardian yesterday for Gemma Brockis' Oddvent calendar, and thanks to Gemma for allowing me to grant all of you ole unattendees Very Important Person access, as we say in the threshold business, through today's door. Click here
to open it and witness my contribution – possibly inspired by the
Cosmic Shambles' many show-and-tells – there's more information about
the calendar here,
and if you need one the password for today is "help". (My first idea
was to giftwrap an egg, but I'm not doing that now, so giftwrapping an
egg is still going.) Enjoy!
UPDATE: Now the Calendar has vanished, my contribution's up on youtube.
As soon as it gets cold and dark the lights can go up. I'm fine with that.
Continuing to wind up the review of my favourite or at least more conspicuous posts from the last twelve months, November saw a lot of these going up late – over a week late sometimes – but I made up for it in the end, and the delay actually made it easier to work out what I was going to write, so there are a lot of posts I like from November but this one made me smile the most. It provides a nice coda to September's complaint of feeling like I hadn't really "recovered the knack of experiencing", and as a return to Forbidden Planet also ties in nicely with July. I'd pretty much forgotten I'd written it – I'm thinking a lot about schools, aren't I? – but the argument I stumble across for at least one way in which comics are superior to books still seems sound. It's nominally from Thursday, November the 5th...
Can you see a white arrow in the centre? I think you can press that.
The
following four posts will all begin with me confessing that I'm posting
them on the evening of Saturday the seventh. Now I've cleared the air,
here is a video of Forbidden Planet that I took on Monday before the
second lockdown. It's a bookmark more than a record: I was feeling
something, and thought if I took a video of the place where I felt it,
it might help me to remember it – as good a use for my new phone as any I suppose.
I tried to describe this feeling later to Joel Morris and Will Maclean
whom I happily bumped into at the queue for the cashier upstairs. Will had just had a book published.
It was now in the shops. We had coffee, our shopping at our feet, and
were happy. Men of our age had not been the majority in the shop
however; it was full of girls now – not women, girls – doing what we'd
done as boys: looking for worlds built on messages. The toys were
upstairs on the ground floor but here in the basement were the warnings,
the comics that let you know the future might be cruel and that coping
might mean fighting in bright colours. It felt peaceful because comics
make no noise, even when they're full of fighting. That's what I was
feeling, and although I hadn't read any recently and I'm always in
Forbidden Planet and was never into super-heroes, for a spot of time
just before I took out my camera, I felt
like I was looking round an old school again, a school I had been
allowed to
choose for myself. The covers on the shelves facing outwards felt like
allies, a
feeling I don't get in bookshops. Covers of books without pictures have
scenery on their cover, or handwriting, and rarely look at you with the
faces of young people ready to fight your corner.
Beginning to wind up this review of my favourite or at least more conspicuous posts from the last twelve months, this post from October is entirely about stuff from January (including another plug for my Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman essay) but I really enjoyed writing about this job. I have only one wince of regret, which I didn't mention before, and that's the lack of preparation I put into the shot where I return to my seat after making peace with Pat. Every time I see it I wish I'd entered looking more rattled, smiling with relief only as I
turn to the window and realise closure's finally been achieved.
As long-term readers of this blog will know, I maybe don't have that much experience of actual closure, so what do I know, but this just looks to me just like someone very happy with their new kitchen. That's my problem though. What a job. What a show. What a team! From October the 29th...
This, gloriously, is the scene we filmed the day Terry Jones died.
I can't think of a better way to honour the man's memory. The blow that
initiates the cacophony was
achieved by digitally removing Jim Howick's fist as it nears my body so
it looks like it's passing through. We're not as close to
each other in the still below as it looks, in other words, there's a false perspective
or something, I think that's how it was done anyway, it's... Does that
look right? It was back in January, I've no idea now. Welcome to Behind The Scene with Kieth Darren Dean!
I definitely remember that when I walked through Jim in the next scene,
after leaving the stump, I passed him on the
right and this was then digitally shunted to the left to overlap him, but
you probably guessed it was something like that. There was a green
screen set up outside the house. The weather was perfectly overcast,
although there was no snow. It looked like this. That's frost on the ground.
Each
of us ("us" - Get me!) had to walk up the strip of white plastic
alone, pause at the end, then walk back in front of everyone else
without giggling, like a shy fashion show. It was in its way the
silliest thing I
witnessed all week and I felt blessed to have a seat at it. Actually,
it wasn't so much like a catwalk I now realise, it felt more like -
Have you seen The Ususal Suspects?
And in other notices, continuing the Hallowee’en Countdown through Universal’s Frankensteins, here
is the one instance of proper scholarlship I managed in the entire run -
a piece of sleuthing that will change the way you watch 1943′s Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man FOREVER!
Last one for
today. I'd always wanted to be prove useful to a museum, so participating in Ships, Sea and the Stars this year was a huge treat for me. Thanks to Dr. Helen Czerski not just for inviting me aboard, but for her entire online output this year, much of it in collaboration with Robin Ince, whose work on the Cosmic Shambles provided the kind of schooling I would previously only have expected from life on a star cruiser. In a year spent so otherwise sedentary, that felt a bit like being rescued, and I haven't yet seen Helen's Royal Institute Lecture on the Oceans which aired yesterday but I hear she enters on a wire and that sounds apt. I could have picked any of these, but here's the last one, from September the 21st...
The mainly non-mythological constellations of the southern hemisphere,
including Chameleon, Compass, Toucan and Telescope (source.)
The final Ships, Sea & The Stars of this series is up now, in which you can hear me read an A. A. Milne
poem that was completely new to me (at 29:00) and a terrific account by
Charles Darwin of his attempts to test the hearing of worms (at 4:17). The theme of this episode – in coordination with Heritage Open Days
– is "Hidden Nature" which, according to guest and "preventive
conservator" Maria Bastidas-Spence, unambiguously means bugs. It's rare
to see an insect expert who actually hates insects, and weirdly
rewarding, an addition to carpet beetles and constellations, the team
discuss ship's mascots: it seems pretty much every species has at some
point been considered for mascothood, including a polar bear.
This
isn't him though, this is "Trotsky". As soon as I learnt of his
existence I whatsapped my Finnemore colleagues and... well, long story
short, John has finally decided on a name for his first child.
Unfortunately though, Trotsky – the photographed Trotsky above, not the
putative Trotsky Finnemore – would ultimately be shot dead by a sailor
tragically unaware that "ship's bear" was a thing. A very sad death
then, but I can't say he was necessarily on the wrong side of History.
Continuing the review of my favourite or at least more conspicuous posts from the last twelve months, August by contrast was both too hot and too cold, but I still managed to produce not one but TWO "Richard the Second"s, because the first one had been too boring. As Gillian Anderson above would prove a few months later, you've got to do the voice! So it felt good to get that sorted, but then my laptop would begin to shut down every time I opened iMovie and the later I left it to find a workaround to continue making Simon Goes Full Shakespeare the closer I came to risking Henry V going out just as we left the EU, not something I had a taste for. Maybe I'll try edidting on my phone. This is from Sunday, August the 16th...
Firstly, I admit that contrary to the date given above this post is
actually going out on Monday evening. So I'm glad to be getting back
into Full Shakespeare, but I'm also going to blame it for how late I'm now getting everything else done, including it.
Secondly, I recently received some typically clarifying thoughts from Gemma Brockis about the "Formal Run" of Richard the Second
(viewable HERE) which I hope she won't mind me sharing: "He's normally played as a
bit of an odd ball or outsider," she wrote "But if he's powerful then
his descent feels weirder. Which it should... In making it glamorous,
and epic, you kind of don't care so much about liking people," which is a
relief. She also uses the word "majestic", which eluded me and
is spot on; really I should rename these the "Oddball" and "Majestic"
runs. But what exactly is Majesty? How does one picture it?
It's not really seen as a heterosexual, cis male quality these days,
and I wonder if that's a Post-Revolutionary thing, not
just because capital-R, poets-on-crags-with-pamphlets Romanticism
promoted a more egalitarian, no-frills idea of masculinity but because –
and this is something I only realised yesterday – for the
majority of its history since the French Revolution, Britain hasn't actually had a king.1800-1837, a couple of Georges. 1837-1901, sixty-three years of Queen Victoria. 1901-1952, an Edward and a George and an Edward and a George. 1952-2020, sixty-eight
years of Queen Elizabeth. Another friend
wondered whether if Britain had actually had more kings we'd still have a
royal
family at all, or would the men have blown it. Playing the "Majesty" of
Richard feels apt then but
also, at least initially, inescapably female, which reads as camp, which
is presumably why noone does it. Even Fiona Shaw played Richard as an
"odd ball".
Another problem – and perhaps the source of a lot of my initial
impatience with this play – came from unfavourably comparing it to
Marlowe's Edward the Second, in which a King's misplaced love
for his favourite, and his subjects' hatred of that love, drive the
whole story. There it doesn't matter what you think of the Crown; a man
is imprisoned for an unrequited love, his tragedy is clear, and in the
shadow of that
tragedy Richard's own fall feels squeamishly
underwritten. But Richard's sexuality or lack of it isn't actually a
contributing factor to his tragedy, it just provides Bolingbroke with
slurs whose utterance make him
as despicable as everyone else. Rather this is a tragedy about a
God-appointed show off. When Richard's understanding of himself as a
king is
contradicted, he reinvents himself as a saint, and in prison we see him
discover this is even more naive an ambition, and that he might as well
pretend to be a clock. He's entirely ready for death, until it comes,
and good for him. This is a play about a failing artist.
Audiences like those and so do actors..
And there's something genuinely fun about the old-school use of an actor's voice to do everything but
imitate natural human speech, a fun that transmits even though its
power is ungenerous and of no use to anyone else on stage. Nowadays it's
something we see women use more than men. Men just shout. It's an
isolated voice,
and Gemma's right, it doesn't matter if we actually like the owner.
Here's another way of looking at the Formal Run then: Richard nailed the
performative aspect of Majesty to the bitter end, but botched the
policy. He
may or may not have been Elizabeth the First but – and again this is
something that only occurred to me yesterday – bloody hell does he
remind
me of Margaret Thatcher.
Continuing the review of 2020, bookshops were opening up, people were meeting, it wasn't too hot and it wasn't too cold. I was finally seeing daylight and had the West End on my doorstep. Very briefly, a simpler time was being aced. This is from July 18th...
For these past two days I've headed south out of my front door, and a
lot has seemed suitable. Some shops are open now, as you know. I went to
Forbidden Planet. You have to enter through the rear door, where the
people behind the desk explain happily and quietly the new one way
system, and how you're not supposed to touch anything that you don't
want to buy, and as I moved through the shop I looked at these vinyl
wotnots with new eyes and realised I was now in the mindset of a visitor
to a regional toy museum, which felt like an improvement. When I
exited everything outside seemed improved upon as well: Shaftesbury Avenue seemed
suitably free of traffic, with a suitable number of people in masks
keeping a suitable distance even as far as Oxford Street. And the
evening seemed suitably warm. And by suitably I mean perfectly. I mean
just right, which it strikes me is something London hardly ever seems,
which is fair enough. I've known the city deserted, but not simply
uncrowded – with one possible exception: the Summer of 2012, when the
Olympics saw a lot of Londoners leave because they thought it was going
to be unbearable, and it turned out to be more bearable than we'd
known in years. According to my daily Covid reporting-on-myself
app however, the number of new cases has risen twenty five percent to
two-thousand a day, so perhaps this feeling is madness, but it feels
like the opposite, that's the point, and I thought that worth recording.
Look at it. Thank you, like the banners say, and hashtag stay safe.
Continuing the review of my favourite or at least more conspicuous posts from the last twelve months, here's the last one for today: In June the streets began to fill again. I also took to the streets but normally after midnight. When I posted this I'd no idea how big a part public art was going to play,I'd just really had it with statues. It would be another five days before Colston fell in Bristol, and Black Lives Matter was never about a "culture war" anyway, it was about deaths in police custody. As more and more attention was paid, I began to feel genuine hope, unlike anything I'd really felt before. Then the BBC gave Naga Munchetty a bollocking, and a prize to J.K. Rowling. This is from June the 2nd...
Here's nothing. I'm keeping vampire hours again. Lacking both heat-reisistant gloves and goggles as recommended by the excellent Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,
and unkeen on combing through fourteen years of my social media to wipe
it of "personal details and anything that could be perceived as
inciting violence" as recommended by the excellent Varaidzo,
oh and also, you know, just being a hoverer, I didn't get to Trafalgar
Square on Sunday to mourn George Floyd until two in the morning.
But General Napier was still there, and Major General Sir Henry
Havelock, and the fat prince. The fourth plinth was empty though, I
noticed, fleeced of its Ninevite Lamassu...
"Statue lovers" someone said knowingly of the torch-wielding protestors
at Charlottesville, and I've thought about that quite a bit since, and
decided yeah, I don't like statues of real people I realise, not really,
not any more. Any of them. Even the lovely ones just look creepy and
wrong, even Eric Morecambe. Unmistakably unalive. Borne of a tradition
intended to literally deify tyrants. And I suppose I'm just retreading my moan from the last post,
aren't I, but, like Mark Gatiss, statues fetishise the past without a
shred of interest in
history. Don't get me wrong, I like creepy things as much as the next
fantasist. And I warm to the decor of a haunted house. But I wouldn't
say I'm a statue lover. I also saw a fox. He looked shiny and unafraid. I
think foxes are having a good lockdown.
Continuing the review of my favourite or at least more conspicuous posts from the last twelve months: I barely left the flat in May. I was getting money from the Government and had no complaints. Everyone was pretty much keeping indoors, but over on the blog Mark Antony was about to rally a mob that would turn Brutus' dream of a Rule of the People to flaming shit. Here in other words is me doing "Friends, Romans, Countrymen". From May the 20th...
I'm glad I looked up Atë, mentioned in Antony's curse below. Daughter of the goddess Discordia (above) whose golden apple sparked the Trojan War, Atë is the goddess of ruinous mistakes. According to wikipedia she walks upon the heads of men rather than the earth, possibly another mistake, and like the goddess Brigid
she also appears a lot online in paintings by artists who like to use
all the colours. No spoilers for Act Three, but I enjoy thinking of Mark
Antony as a secret Discordian,
a nihilist hedonist, like Charles Manson. There was a time I would have
tried to play him less nakedly phoney, but people don't really need to
believe a man to follow him, they just need him to give them a role, and
it's still astonishing to me how good Shakespeare was at nailing this. The inventor of Rory's Story Cubes might also be a secret
Discordian, by the way, given the cubes bear not one but both of the
goddess' symbols - the apple and the wheel of chaos - handy for today's
opening title anyway.
Alternative titles: The Reading of the Will, or "Pardon me, Julius"
Another day, another three of my favourite, or at least more conspicuous posts from the last twelve months: April saw us head indoors and online and I'd never felt so grateful in my life to be living alone. I could still see my friends because everyone was now making stuff – it turns out it hadn't been the internet keeping everyone listless, it had been pubs. Carrie was Nincompooping now, and Arthur Shappey was learning the piano while the canon of his facial hair slowly aligned with John's, so I thought I'd joined in, and it staggers me to think that April saw me not only embark upon this project but complete it and move onto The Complete Works of Shakespeare before the month was over. That's how much time was slowing down. Plague Year's still a very pertinent read by the way; there was no way this was going to be over by the Summer. This is from April the 2nd...
A couple of days ago I started reading Daniel Defoe's "A Journal of the
Plague Year" which I just happened to have in the flat, and I found it
so interesting I've decided to start reading it aloud on youtube for
anyone else who might to enjoy these insights into 1665 (dressed for
some reason in "It Only Hurts When I Laugh" pyjamas.) It's a novel
rather than a journal, a work of well researched fiction, as Defoe was
actually five when the plague hit, and I haven't finished the book yet
so there might be all kinds of horrors in store. Be warned, it starts,
as much apocalyptic fiction does, with a dry list
of the initial death tallies, so if you want to jump right into the
human interest stuff with the narrator debating whether or not to leave
the city or stay and look after his business (plus some laughs) skip to
12:52, and if you just want to skip my opening waffle go to 1:40. Here
then are the first twelve pages.
I should be able to post one of these a day if you fancy subscribing.
Or if you're interested but don't want to have to put up with me
reading it, the full "journal" is available to read for yourself
online here.
And that's a hundred straight posts in a hundred days! I do find it odd
that I started this before, as it were, I needed to. I think I've been
subconsciously self-isolating since the election, basically. Posting
happy thoughts only though. Happy thoughts and the plague. I hope
everyone's doing superbly! Big love.
Continuing this review of my favourite or at least more conspicuous posts from the last twelve months here's the last one for today, composed in what would turn out to be my penultimate week of working at the
Crystal Maze. Starved of collaborators, "Sung Blog Sunday" would soon
grind to a halt, and this is probably the best thing I made all year. It's shorter than Titus Andronicus anyway. From March the first. Un, deux, trois...
My second bash at GarageBand, suggested by a conversation in the green room of the Crystal Maze with Catherine Davies, who also suggested rhyming "bleu" with "azure", and the line "I hear sailors are easy to scare" so big thanks, Catherine. I dip my toe into using loops here, but not equalizers, nor have I yet bought a mic. Attempt enjoyment, listeners! (Cover art from George Leonnec below, and Weeki Wachee Spring's mermaid archive above, photographer and model unknown.)
This publicity still of Bela and Lon was on our living room wall
when I was growing up. I had completely forgotten.
Continuing this review of my favourite or at least more conspicuous posts from the last twelve months I definitely wanted to include a "Frankenstein Wednesday", and this is the one I'm probably proudest of. I still hope it might some day help to restore the reputation of both this daft work and the great, if miscast, Bela Lugosi - Well, was he miscast? Was he even cast? And if so, as who? That's what I attempt to ravel and then unravel again... There's a particularly baffling scene in the baffling Netflix biopic Mank where a room full of playwright wankers pitch their classier version of Frankenstein and then go on to describe almost exactly the film Frankenstein as if they've never actually seen it, adding only a weeping priest at the end, and I can't tell if it's supposed to be a joke or not, but anyway I absolutely loved trying to do these films justice, and lockdown hadn't even happened yet. This is from February 16th...
I think I've uncovered something in this film not mentioned
anywhere else, something quite important, which might be why the longer I've left writing about this film the harder it's got. It isn't the fact that Bela
Lugosi's place was often taken by a stunt double called Gil Perkins (as
pictured above), lending the Monster a pleasingly squished Ötzi the
Iceman quality; that is well documented, for example here in imdb.
Ötzi the Iceman
It's to do with a twist that's very clearly given away in one shot - a
secret one of the characters has been hiding that should completely
change our understanding of what we've just watched, but appears in no
account or
summary I can find. First though, some background. There's a lot of
background...
Not a scene from the film, more's the pity.
1941's "The Wolfman" was not Universal's first werewolf movie. That was
1935's "Werewolf of London", a surprisingly botany-heavy story steeped
in Jack-the-Ripper atmos, featuring an uptight British type called Dr.
Wilfred Glendon. Star Henry Hull fell out with make-up maestro Jack
Pierce after refusing to don a full muzzle as later sported by Chaney,
resulting in actually a far more frightening and influential, if less
iconic, look for his man beast.
However, while WoL established the mythos of a bite which
creates a beast that must kill whenever the moon is full, contemporary
audiences still dismissed the exercise as a rip-off of Jekyll and Hyde.
So, when Univeral returned to the idea in 1941, they chose for their hero,
not an uptight European scientist this time, but Lon Chaney Junior as a
visiting American, and man of the people, "Larry Talbot", who sits on
the wrong bit of the armchair in a fancy castle, or in the front with
his
chauffeur, like John McClane. Talbot tries it on with locally engaged
Gwen
Conliffe, whom he takes to a "gypsy carnival". There he is bitten by a
dog
he then beats to death, only to have it turn into Bela Lugosi. Bela's
mother, the gypsy Maleva, is the only one who can explain this mystery,
the keeper of the lore - a potentially problematic depiction, unless one
considers how much the Catholic church would literally kill to be
considered this powerful an authority on the supernatural. Talbot is
finally despatched in his wolfman form (not that of a dog, like Bela –
never explained) when his skull is smashed in with a silver cane by his
father, and Maleva repeats a beautiful elegy over his body, previously
spoken for her
own son: "The way you walk was thorny, through no fault of your own, but
as the
rain enters the soil, the river enters the sea, so tears run to a
predestined end." She is played by Maria Ouspenskaya, who studied under
Stanislavsky, and every time she reaches "... to a predestined end" the
mixture of grief and relief broadcast will leave you feeling naked.
Beyond that predestined end however, falls the sequel. "Universe" is an
overused word when talking about film, but it's also an exciting one so
let's use it: "Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man" created the first
Cinematic Universe. Before Marvel, before DC, before "Happy Days". Not
only was it the first sequel to two previously unrelated films, it was
also, arguably, an improvement on "The Wolfman", and definitely an
improvement on "The Ghost of Frankenstein".
The look on Maleva's face when the resurrected Larry Talbot found his
way back to her is why we have sequels. And making her the liminal
instrument of
this crossover between stories was just one of the many excellent ideas
"The Wolf Man"'s screenwriter Curt
Siodmak had that helped give this project a hope of making sense. And
when Siodmak's script gives us unmusical exposition, director Roy
William Neil and
cinematographer George Robinson ensure that every frame is still a
painting; the shot of Maleva's cartwheel, for example, thicker than
itself with
the mud of worlds as she and her newly adoped son move between myths in
search of the secret of death...
Or the justly celebrated opening scene, in which Talbot is
inadvertantly resurrected by
graverobbers in a crooked cemetery busy with crows. Even the simple
phone call to a police station in Llanwelly a few scenes later, made by
Inspector Owen hoping for some clue as to the identity of his
hospitalised American, is an evocative example of just what
can be done with care and a camera: a perfect composition of character
and clutter suggesting either cosiness if you're a local, or
claustrophobia if you're a stranger. (Apologies for all the "c"s.)
Not an example of what I just said, but I can't screengrab from Blurays.
In the end though, maybe too much care
went into this film, because "Frankenstein Meets The Wolf
Man" predicts the future of franchise blockbusters not only in its
creation of a cinematic universe, but also in its telling of a story
posthumously butchered by reshoots. Working out what the original story
might have been is one of both the happiest and saddest aspects of
watching the film, because beautiful as it is, what reaches us is still a
mess, best remembered for what it got wrong: the Monster.
We never see Lugosi do this in the film.
Bela Lugosi was sixty when he finally got to play Frankenstein's
Monster, who's found by Talbot encased in ice beneath the ruins of
Frankenstein's castle in Vasaria. This is not however, you may remember,
exactly how we left him at the end of "Ghost of Frankenstein". That
film ended with the Monster given the brain of his devious "familiar"
Ygor, a brain that would give the Monster world-conquering intelligence
but also, because of a blood mismatch, leave him blind. In his blindness
the Monster, now voiced by Ygor actor Bela Lugosi, stumbles into a
shelf that was presumably put up by Linda Barker because everything
blows up when it falls over, including the sanitarium of Ludwig
Frankenstein, younger son of the Frankenstein who first created this
Monster, who had mistakenly implanted the brain of Ygor into etc... One
can understand why, having to deal with both this continuity and that of
"The Wolf Man" Universal decided to smooth a few things out a bit for
the sequel, reintroducing the lumbering mute giant that audiences would
be more familiar with, rather than continue the story of Ygor's brain.
But we also know that this was a decision made quite late, maybe too
late, because the monster was originally given dialogue, but when test
audiences heard Lugosi's Hungarian accent they laughed it out of town.
We're also told that Lugosi was playing the monster blind, which is why
he always has his arms out in that I'm-coming-to-get-you stance that
became short-hand for the undead, and that all references to his
blindness were removed from the movie, which is why Lugosi's performance
seems so inexplicably stiff. Even these behind-the-scenes reports
however don't really explain how an actor as capable of poetry as Lugosi
could wind up giving a performance so clunky, in a film in which
everyone else is so very, very good. Including this guy:
"The Song of the New Wine" might be my favourite scene. Anyone who's
sat through "Cosi Cosa" in the Marx Brothers' "Night At the Opera" will
sympathise with Chaney's longing for death while surrounded by this
ersatz buffoonery, but given the year of "Frankenstein Meets The Wolf
Man"'s release, the nightmarishness of this lederhosen-heavy, rural
knees-up might not be unintentional. The singer praises proprietor
Vazec's warm welcome for example, but the last time we saw this tyrolean
Tim Wetherspoon he was hounding a gypsy out of his inn. And while no
mention is ever made of how good a war the locals of Vasaria might be
having, their police have definitely had a change of uniform:
Rolecall, left to right: That's Lionel Awill again in the foreground.
Definitely Lionel Atwill this time. Not Sir Cedric Harwdwicke. He's the
Mayor, he collects pipes, he's a goody. Next along, that's Baroness Elsa
Frankenstein, played by Ilona Massey. Is this the same Elsa who was
daughter to Ludwig in "Ghost"? I definitely think we're not supposed to
ask that. She talks about the work of both her father and her
grandfather though, so yes she must be, which then begs the question of
what happened to her cousin Mr. Hanky the Christmas Poo
Peter from "Son of Frankenstein" if she's now inherited the lot. Anyway
Talbot wants to buy the castle/sanitarium/ruin off her, because it may
contain equipment that will finally free him from the curse of his
lycanthrop by killing him off. And Elsa is fine with that; this
Frankenstein is not remotely interested in Science. She's interested in
good times, and fabulous hats.
While Dr. Frank's oath prevents him from taking Talbot's life,
it is still he rather than Baroness Frankenstein who gets the old
life-and-death equipment up and running, Lugosi's monster who directs
them to the equipment, and the Baroness who finds her father's books. In
the only version of the film that survives, it is then Talbot who first
asks to be shown Frankenstein's kaboodle having freed the Monster from
the ice, but that appears to be added afterwards in Audio Dialogue
Replacement, and we know Lugosi's dialogue was cut - we can see his lips
moving - so maybe we don't have the whole story.
Definitely blind.
Anyway Dr. Frank Mannering learns with some direction from the awkward,
mute Monster, that life can be transferred from one body to another and
that it can also be drained, so this is how Talbot wishes to die. The
Monster has also just done a rampage, so Elsa hopes Mannering will drain
the Monster's life as well and clear her family name. In fact not just
Elsa's freedom, but that of Mannering and Maleva seem conditional upon
the Monster's destruction post-rampage. It's the best Atwill's mayor can
offer them. They wait for Dr. Frank to repair the machinery therefore,
Elsa nervous that he might be secretly planning to make the Monster
stronger - just because that's what scientists do - while back at the
inn, proprietor Vazec and his superb shirt are stirring shit and
plotting to blow up the dam by the hospital/castle/ruin so that our
heroes will all drown "like rats". (Oh yes, an enormous dam was pointed
out when Talbot and Maleva first arrived, like the sulphur pit suddenly
in the basement of the laboratory in "Son". Good to have some
foreshadowing again.) It is at this point in the story that the shot I
banged on about at the beginning of this post occurs. Forgive the poor
quality, I can't rip Blu-rays...
Did you see that?!! THE MONSTER'S PRETENDING! That walk! Those
dumb stiff arms! They're not there because that's how Lugosi thought
blind monsters walk, they're there because, all this time, we haven't
been watching Lugosi play the Monster at all, but Lugosi playing Ygor playing the stupid Monster! It's a con! So there was continuity all along. And that's
what we lost in the reshoots. Not just lines of dialogue, or an
explanation of his blindness, but an explanation for his entire
performance - a whole storyline in which Ygor is using the Monster's
guileless body to manipulate Talbot and Dr. Frank into granting him
super-human strength. Consider also the look Lugosi gives as the Wolf
Man's life is slowly transferred...
Every commentary I've seen suggests this look was proof that in the
orginal script the Monster's sight had now returned. But as the clip
above proves, he could already see! This is just him getting
stronger! The moon is full, however, and so Talbot though drained of
life is transformed once again, defeating Ygor's evil plans in a final
battle, saving the world and finally achieving redemption. And maybe he
was still drowned at the end, I don't know, but what a story that would
have been! Of course that's not the story we now have, since Universal
decided as a result of the test screenings that people didn't want a
megalomaniacal Hungarian-voiced Monster. But without the presence of
Ygor, the Monster has no agency, and the film's final fight is
completely without stakes. Someone simply ADR's "Don't pull that lever",
some beams fall, and Gil Perkins takes over the Monster duties, keeping
things stiff despite shots in which we could see Lugosi move far more
fluidly and threateningly despite his sixty years and his bad back...
Finally it is Vazec of all people who saves the day. Elsa looks on
pointlessly as the Dam bursts, the valley floods, and the crimes of her
grandfather are finally wiped clean. But this isn't "Frozen 2". The
nazis won. And Lugosi's performance will be condemned as a mockery,
without anyone realising that mockery is exactly what the actor had been
going for. When he roars at the Wolf Man in the final ruckus, he's
taking the piss! A beautiful, sly, brave performance, which robbed of
context, proved to be Lugosi's last in any Horror film for Universal. So
it goes.
Oh Bela. As Maleva might say, "the way you walked was funny, through no
fault of your own..." but Thank the Gods for Roy William Neil! Because
he smuggled in that shot. It's unalterably there, and for those in the
know, only Ygor's presence can explain it. So we do have that
story. We've had it all along. It just seems weird I can't find any
evidence that anyone else has ever noticed it. But it's definitely there! You saw it, right? If you did, pass it on. Bela deserves this. And let's celebrate perhaps the best B-movie ever made!
"Insane? He's not insane. He simply wants to die."
Next week... well in four days' time I guess if Frankenstein Wednesdays are still going to be a thing, 1944's "House of Frankenstein". Karloff's in it. And I'll probably write more about werewolves and make-up and stuff. Guys, this is important.
Initiating a review of my favourite or at least more conspicuous posts from the last twelve months, here's the post I think about most from January – a nicely busy month during which I started reviewing old Universal Frankenstein movies and got to be in Ghosts, but this is about maps and fantasy. Of course the whole world would become a dreamscape later in the year, and M. John Harrison would win the Golsmiths Prize. Rading Pratchett's "Going Postal" last month, I was reminded how similar even the stubborn unplaceability of Ankh-Morpok feels to Viriconium in its collision of Medieval, Imperial, Chivalric, and Industrial rotteness. As Terry Pratchett said, “You can't map a sense of humor." So this is from January the 9th...
I'm very sympathetic to the idea that all the best fiction has a map at
the front, but I'm not a complete convert. Different maps serve
different puposes: the map in The Hobbit is a call to adventure, while the maps of the Hundred Acre Wood or Moominvalley
are more like welcoming gifts. Both types are pretty scant on detail and
both are types I like: maps you don't have to constantly refer to. It's
not just laziness that makes me favour these maps though, it's that they
make no serious attempt to pretend - as some fantasies do - that
imagined lands can be depicted objectively.
It was Nerdwriter's video below that got me thinking about this (that, and the
fact I've just finished "A Wizard of Earthsea" but I'll write about that
map tomorrow).
According to Nerdwriter the "bill of goods" of a fantasy is not
World-Building, but "the ideas and insights that spring forth from the
explosive act of reading":
"Like
all books, Viriconuim is just some words. There is no place, no
society, no dependable furniture to 'make real'. You can't read it for
that stuff, so you have to read it for everything else."
I was delighted to see Harrison's name pop up. I've always loved "In Viriconium" - there's a detectable Viriconian influence here
for example. Like Bastian's Fantasia in "The Neverending Story" the
city is unmappable. In my spare periods at school I used to walk along
the then undeveloped South Bank in the shadow of Bankside Power Station
(now Tate Britain) looking for places it might be, scouting liminal
locations. And any reader in any other city could do the same.
That's one of the reasons I love Orson Welles' film of "The Trial", whence all these images (more here).
Unable to shoot in Prague, Welles had to invent his own dream city from
bits of Paris, Milan, Rome, Dubrovnik and Zagreb – effectively shooting
the film in Viriconium. Terry Gilliam's own stab at Kafka a couple of decades
later, "Brazil",
would conjure a similar city out of real locations its setting - "somewhere in the twentieth century" - similarly
vague.
That's why I'm not a-hundred-per-cent a fan of maps at the beginning
of books. Fantasy locations are unvisitable. Definitive visualisations are
impossible.
That said...
... I can't have been the only child to think Tolkein was taking
the piss with his illustations to "The Hobbit". Show us the bloody
monsters.
