This Week's Drinks

 It's tax day today, and it's Brexit day, so Joel Morris and I met this evening for what turned out to be a responsible three and a half pints each. I brought Joel up to date with other drinks I'd had this week, and we both took notes. Joel noted, for example, that there should be a Liff word for the person in a group elected to explain the rules of a boardgame, an observation borne from me recalling how last Sunday I'd tried to explain the plot of the film "Cats" to John Finnemore. (I'd forgotten how easy it can be to make John weep with laughter.) Joel also noted how often he was hearing Tom Petty in pubs these days, and how effectively the pitch of his voice cut through the murmur of a crowd, like the tambourine in a Motown track that makes those songs so ideal for a jukebox. I passed on a Fun Fact I'd learnt in a bar from Mark Steel the night before, attending a recording of David Reed's outstanding podcast "Inside The Comedian", a fact for which I can find no evidence online... Actually before I tell you, think of the thinnest celebrity you can imagine. Okay. Now think of the widest. Okay, now here's the fact: John Cooper Clarke's school bully was Giant Haystacks.

Something else the "Cats" film reminded me of.
 

 What else? We talked about the background noise of vanishing coin, something I'd felt suddenly absent from the second series of "Fleabag" for example, and of the work of freelancers who constantly live with that background noise, and of the creative, commissioning and critical decisions of those who don't, and how so much British Cinema in our lifetimes seemed to be the work of the latter, telling stories that either ignore money completely or contrastingly find poverty fascinating, and I thought that might explain why so many British films are either Boring or Horrible. I was probably on my third pint by then. Cracking chat.

 And here's a neat place for plugs. Joel and Jason Hazeley's "Rule Of Three" podcast serves as lasting proof of just how good at talking they are, and is hearable here. David's podcast "Inside the Comedian", in which guests are not allowed to tell the truth, can be heard here, also if you can get over to one of the live recording at Kings Place I'd really recommend that too. David and I are of course both in Joel And Jason's scandi-nougat "Angstrom" which is apparently available on BBC Sounds forever here. Oh also, David has a scifi comedy pilot out next week here, "Napoleon Moon", which should be excellent. John meanwhile, though not credited as one of the writers of Armando Iannucci's "David Copperfield", is from what I've seen of the trailers absolutely all over it, so we should redouble our efforts to see that too. It looks neither Boring nor Horrible. The photo of Soho is from my Instagram. The image of the 50p coin celebrating the UK's joining the EEC in 1973 and depicting a Ring of Hands is from this video. And finally, not really a plug, but l wrote this post the day before the decision to leave the EU was taken three and a half years ago. I still think it's a dumb decision, and Europe, I love you, and we will be back. Bissous.

Self-Portrait with Sherilyn Fenn (1991)

 I never really worked out what a "Visual Notebook" was for.

Frankenstein Wednesdays: "Son of Frankenstein" (1939) – An Heir to the House of Fronkensteen!

 Continuing my weekly "But What Do I Know!" through Universal's first 8 Frankensteins...

 

 Boris! Basil! Um, Bela?

 There are few scenes in Rowland V. Lee's "Son of Frankenstein" where one couldn't imagine the company bursting into laughter the second the director shouted "Cut!" It is an extraordinarily happy film – extraordinary especially as one of its happiest elements is fallen star Bela Lugosi playing a body-snatcher with a broken neck. Lugosi had just become a father, as had Karloff, seen here sharing a moment of swagger with Bela Jr.:

  And the story of the film's making is also often a happy one. In 1936 Universal had resolved to stop making Horror after a British boycott of the whole genre (stupid bloody country), but this hiatus proved short-lived. A nation-wide re-release of both "Frankenstein" and "Dracula" in 1938 proved so popular, the studio immediately dug out the old tesla coils and machines that go BVURRRP, as well as Bela Lugosi, whose reputation and career had taken a horrific hit from this hiatus. According his widow, Lillian Donlevy Lugosi:

"[The studio] cut Bela's salary from $1,000 per week to $500. Then they planned to shoot all his scenes in the picture in one week! When Rowland V. Lee heard about this, he said, and I quote, Those God-damned sons of bitches! I'll show them. I'm going to keep Bela on this picture from the first day of shooting right up to the last! And he did."

  Lee really did. There's barely a scene in this film's opening twenty minutes where Lugosi isn't eavesdropping somewhere as "Ygor", his shaggy, snaggle-toothed head popping up from behind a rock or a broken window for a day's pay. A good gig, especially as Ygor wasn't even in the first shooting script.

 But, boy, is Ygor in the finished film! Not the scoliotic assistant from future spoofs, this Ygor-with-a-Y is a shunned criminal, who having survived hanging, is now something of an embarrassment to other Frankensteinians. Oh yes! It turns out "Frankenstein" is actually the name of the village, and Frankensteinians is what they call themselves! Lugosi gives a revelatorily anarchic performance as the real monster of this movie, a million miles from the Margaret-Dumontish aristocrats he played previously. There's something of the wicked witch about him too – children dare each other to approach his crooked house – and in his shrewd adoption of lowest possible status to avoid suspicion, there's also something of Columbo, but if Columbo was the murderer (Ygor's using the Monster to kill off the jury who sent him to the gallows; that's the sort of the plot Lee manages to rustle up.)

 The face he's coughing into above? Michael Mark! Maria's father in "Frankenstein", but as I remarked last week, absent from its sequel "Bride"! And just off camera is Lionel Belmore! The Burgomaster from "Frankenstein", also absent from "Bride"! Both of the Monster's final victims are refugees from the Frankenstein canon, whom Rowland V. Lee has returned to the fold. See? Happy!

 Aw, and the mob's back too. But instead of torches, they now weild axes (which might be safer, who knows?) but when we first meet them they're a sea of umbrellas, braving torrential rain to meet the late Doctor's American heir, Wolf (sic) von Frankenstein at the Bahnhof, only to then showily walk out on him. They're a miserable bunch of rock-throwers, and I'm not sure we're meant to mind when they're murdered. Obviously Mel Brooks' "Young Frankenstein" was influenced by this film, but there's a strong possibility "Blazing Saddles" was too.

 And "The Shining"! Because, unlike Gene Wilder's Frederick, Basil Rathbone's Wolf has brought his family along with him. As Elsa, Josephine Hutchinson's almost immediate disenchantment with the adventure her husband has undertaken is perhaps the saddest thing in the film, not that you can blame her: "If the house is filled with dread, place the beds at head to head..." This relationship is no more happily heteronormative than its predecessors, and their new home has neither the claustrophobic chintz of "Frankenstein", nor the eccentric kitsch of "Bride". It's just... well, this:

 And this:

 And this:

  Although some people might find that last view quite sexy. It's nice too, after the lever from nowhere that blew everything up in "Bride", to finally have some foreshadowing: Oh okay, that's how the monster's going to die.

  It's surprising to hear even Wolf acknowledge in this film that nine out of ten people think "Frankenstein" is now the name of the monster. It's also funny. And as he descends deeper into the sulphurous unniceties of his father's sexless work – literally trying to save his name – Elsa starts fearing for his sanity (again, you can't blame her.) Rathbone is a brilliant actor, but not a sympathetic one. He's physiognomically incapable of looking anywhere other than down his own nose, and the further he falls, the funnier it is to watch him imperiously try to maintain any semblance of dignity. Also, Rathbone's manic performance suggests he knows this.*

  Meanwhile! Wolf and Elsa's tiny son, Peter, in scenes we never see, has started happily communicating with the horrors in the walls. Potentially terrifying, if only it weren't that everything young actor Donnie Dunagan does and says is hilarious. Tragically I can't find any audible footage of his performace online, but imagine Mr. Hanky the Christmas Poo, and to help, here's a still image of the future voice of Bambi being restrained by Karloff's monster, who in turn is menacing Lionel Atwill's Inspector Krogh with his own prosthetic arm.

  So it's that kind of a film: Huge fun, but also you can understand why Karloff didn't return for a fourth. His creature is comatose for much of it – again, a good gig – and we are finally, three Frankenstein films in, presented with the tableau so often recreated in comedy routines to come (although it's Frankenstein's bird-skeletoned butler Benson here who throws the switches, not Ygor):

 There is one superb, wordless sequence, three minutes long, when Frankenstein's two offspring – the Monster and Wolf – first face one another: Karloff's monster no longer talks. I'm fine with that. In fact I'm fine pretending, for the sake of this movie, "Bride" never happened. Some of what Karloff does – examining his brother's face, then his own reflection – has the poetry and clarity of his reaching up for the light, back in 1931. But some of it is distressingly, if convincingly, unreadable. When he brings Wolf over to the mirror, what's he doing? Is he seeing if the mirror is lying? Is he performing an experiment? What's he asking for? I don't know. Nor does Wolf. So the monster gives up. And you can't blame him. He is a stranger to us now.

  It's unusual to see him carry out Ygor's murders so slily. Making things look like an accident was never really our boy's style. Oh well, one-armed Inspector Krogh is on the case, an almost Spielbergian portrait of dependability and genuine goodness from Lionel Atwill, and perhaps the most deadpan performance of the film. But Krogh's dry tone serves not only the film's comedy, but also its surprising celebration of humanity. Atwill brings no bitterness to the loss of his arm, just clarity. And when he sticks darts in the wooden prosthetic, yes it's funny, but also, how else was he going to hold the darts? We may laugh, but we'll catch up with Krogh. 

 It's all good.

 Okay. I'll stop there. 

 The quote from Lugosi's widow comes from here, where you'll also find extracts from Willis Cooper's orginal Ygor-less shooting script. This lovely blog on "Son" also provided useful background, although, generally, I'm trying not to write too much about artists' private lives here. But I like hearing that people were happy.

 Next week, kids, it's 1942's "Ghost of Frankenstein". More Ygor!

 

* Rathbone embarked upon perhaps his most famous role, Sherlock Holmes, this same year. Nigel Bruce's Watson had to be a harmless buffoon for an audience to care what happened to either of them, and it was a perfect partnership. I sort of wish I was writing about those films from now on, rather than what's to come. Still...

See the Audience Trigger My Browning Snippets

 Here's me reading everyone's favourite dramatic monologue, Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess", interpolated into a live composition by Lillie Harris as part of the London Symphony Orchestra's 2018 Soundhub Showcase. The audience milling about the auditorium are moving in and out of spotlights as instructed, triggering snippets of the ten or so different recordings we made so that I never had to worry about delivering anything definitive. Always nice to have my voice employed upon a mellow new creepiness.

 Speaking of which, Darkfield's "Coma" can be experienced next month at King's Cross, together with the company's two other shipping-contained pitch-black spectaculars "Flight" and "Seance". Tickets are here.

Elgar's Norm Id

 As fan films go, "Search/Destroy" is hard to beat. It brings to life a futuristic mutant bounty hunter from the pages of "2000AD", along with his partner who, in that comic's glorious tradition of "just because", is a big ginger viking. Both Johnny Alpha and Wulf Sternhammer are lucky enough to pass as "norms" in a world where the egregiously mutated are regarded as barely human, but for all its various historical parallels Alpha's world isn't a metaphor for anything, just a miserably extrapolated backdrop against which the fun violence can happen. Still...

Sorry you've gone, Carlos Ezquerra.

 It is specifically in the realisation of this world where I think "Search/Destroy" plays an absolute blinder. About eleven minutes in, our heroes approach the main baddie in his layer lair. From his insignia he's clearly politically aligned with Kreelman (the prick pictured above) so he's a Pulp Nazi, but he's also a "norm" like us rather than a foreigner, which is why he's drinking tea. And here's what gives me real chills when I watch the film: as a not-Nazi, the Colonel isn't listening to Wagner either. He's listening to Elgar. In Johnny Alpha's dystopian future, "Nimrod", that beautifully stirring, loved, and entirely familiar work, has become every bit as tainted as "Tristan und Isolde", and can serve as just as effective a lazy shorthand for evil. It's a brilliant touch, and one you couldn't do in a comic. Bravo, team.

Is Wikipedia Down?

 Wait, I think Wikipedia might be down! I'll wonder if we'll ever get it back. Oh well, time for an information intermission. Roll the Chromatrope!

UPDATE: It's back up.

I don't know what to call this. It's about a wonderful week, and Terry Jones, and is short.

 The job I was doing this week had a green room. That may be normal, I have barely any experience of television, so I don't know, but I had the time of my life in this green room. It reminded me a bit of the green room of the old London Dungeon. I was much more of a stranger to this one of course, but that's not what it felt like. Maybe that shouldn't be surprising, maybe all green rooms are basically the same. I doubt it though. I suspect I was very lucky, particularly to have been here, doing this on the day that Terry Jones died... I didn't want to be Terry Jones when I grew up. I wanted to be him immediately, the moment I found out a Python was also writing fairy tales. Not to mention Bert Fegg, Labyrinth, Eric the Viking, Medieval Lives. There seemed to be nothing this adult was doing that a child couldn't at least attempt. So I spent my childhood making silly jokes and silly books, and putting on silly shows and silly voices, and trying to write strange new fairy tales, and correcting people and... Let me just check... Nope, yep, that's still the plan. So that's what I was lucky enough to be doing when he died on Wednesday. Sharing a ride on the deathless ripples of his pebble. Enjoying the deepest, kindest course of Terry Jones' timeline. 

No Terry Jones, no "King Isãbard & Co. of: Theotropolis". He's that important!

 

 Oh, and I've just remembered, in 2001 I sent him one of my books (not the one above), and he replied with two hundred pounds to help take a show based on it to Edinburgh! (Here's the only evidence I could still find of it online; the other reviews were all four stars though, I swear.) And here's an excellent article by Eddie Robson on exactly how important Jones was to Python, track-keepers! And here, finally, is a photo of Michael Palin codedly confirming it:

 

Max Cooper's Further Globules

 I really recommend Max Cooper's youtube channel. I'd never heard of his music before, but the videos to it are glorious, identifiable not by any single director or trademark avatar, but by unifying scientific ideas and principle. (I've no idea how the commissioning works.) Here are three of the most cellular, honouring yesterday's xenobot. Ideally, they should be viewed on as big a screen as possible to appreciate their detail and scale, but you could also just press play on all of these suckers simultaneously and have yourself a ball.

Order From Chaos directed by Maxime Causeret

Seething directed by Andy Lomas

Let There Be directed by Thomas Vanz

"Simple laws can give rise to unexpected outcomes."

Life Hack

  "I, my dear pupil, went for my materials to the source of life! I grew my creatures like cultures, grew them as nature does, from seed!" Dr. Pretorius in The Bride of Frankenstein
 

Universtity of Vermont and Tufts Team Builds First Living Robots 

 "Although the team calls them 'living', that may well depend on how you define living creatures. These xenobots are not able to evolve on their own, there are no reproductive organs, and they are unable to multiply." So says this article about scientists in Vermont who unveiled their... let's call them tiny zombies then... just in time for the first Frankenstein Wednesday last week. And if I'm honest, I'm absolutely fine that they don't have reproductive organs. If anything, I prefer it. You can see one being built here. (I think. I've no idea what I'm looking at.) Also "one design had a hole through the middle in an attempt to reduce drag. This hole could be exapted into a pouch for transporting objects..." so yes, it has pockets!

 Okay thanks, Paul.

Frankenstein Wednesdays: "Bride of Frankenstein" (1935) – Mate

 Continuing my weekly "But What Do I Know!" through Universal's first 8 Frankensteins...

 James Whale's "Bride of Frankenstein" is a morality tale, by which I mean it lets the world off the hook, so I'm not sure I agree with those who think it's better than its pitiless predecessor. For one thing - as I said last week - "Frankenstein" is "Frankenstein"! According to Scott MacQueen's excellent Blu-Ray commentary, Whale didn't even want to make a sequel, Karloff didn't want to talk in it, and suave newbie Claude Rains couldn't play the villain, and so was replaced by Ernest Thesiger, which is a bit like casting Brian Blessed because you can't get Ed Harris.

  I suppose one should ask next, "So how did it go so right?" because there are at least three great films in "Bride". The only problem is, they're great for completely different reasons, and when they come together at the end there's no way to resolve the differences, except pull the lever and blow the place to atoms. In no particular order then – Film One:

 Film One I like to call "Just Let Elsa Lanchester Do Whatever The Hell She Wants!" Tragically, only fragments exist, but they give every indication this might have proved the best of the three. Every decision she makes – as both the prologue's Mary Shelley with her sassy, shit-eating grin ("It will be published. I think") and the Bride hissing like a swan with her mouth in a scream – proves better than correct, astounding but true, mind-expanding. It's just a shame these two decisions count for more than half of the total sum she was allowed to make, because, unlike Karloff's beautiful abomination, Lanchester's is shown no pity at all, and immediately destroyed. Still her work is so haunting, maybe it's wrong to want more. No, to hell with that! I wanted more. And I'm pretty sure she was never allowed to do anything as bold again. There were simply no stories being told for the monsters she could make. Even this story, named after her, wasn't hers. That's Film One. Film Two:

 "The Story That Wouldn't Die!" Karloff's monster survives the fire (if a little scorched and puffier – did he keep his teeth in this time?) only to be condemned to a new tragedy: a life long enough to experience loneliness and a seemingly inescapable cycle of violence. It should be noted that Mary Shelley's recap (in a prologue delivered at least a hundred years before the events depicted in the film, if all dates are to be believed, which is fine, in fact I love it) shows the monster strangle a villager. This never happened in the original film, and revises the creature's history into a pattern of Escape, Killing Spree, Persecution and Capture, which "Bride" will then repeat: In this new version he escapes immolation, drowns Maria's parents in front of an uncaring owl (the father here is recast, although Reginald Barlow heroically attempts Micheal Mark's thousand-yard stare), then attempts a kindness in saving a shepherdess from drowning, is spotted, hunted, caught, crucified (the film opened on Good Friday)...

 ... and imprisoned, then escapes, is hunted etc. It's the hopelessness of this cycle that makes his encounter with the blind hermit so powerful, because suddenly, finally, hope pervades this film, and Karloff plays the wounded animal perfectly here. Only his tears betray his humanity. They're tears of relief.

 It's here too that the monster (against Karloff's wishes) is taught to talk, and as someone who prefers the prequel I agree it's a shame. I didn't need to hear "I hate life... want dead..." to know what was going on. But again, it helps us hope, and the hermit's lessons also help the couple bond. They eat, smoke, play music and love each other, a nation of two. Until the hunters come, and the monster flees, and we're back in the cycle, and it couldn't last, but actually no, to hell with that too! It should have lasted. This is what I mean about the film letting the world off the hook. 

 Meanwhile, the monster's creator has been returned to a far more delirious vision of the ancestral pile than the claustrophobic drawing rooms of the first film, and his wife (fiancée?) is now the seventeen year-old Valerie Hobson – who would later marry John Profumo! – but thankfully, Frankenstein as played by Colin Clive hasn't changed a bit. He may have renounced his studies, but he's still impossibly weak, and literally itching. Enter the monster, echoing his creator's original barked commands to Sit Down, in the one really great use of his new-found power of speech (as also noted by David Cairns), and demanding a mate. Henry refuses. The monster kidnaps his wife until a partner is provided (apparently the hermit also taught him to tie knots). And so Frankenstein the scientist returns to the lab. His twisted watchtower, intantly recognisable, now has kites. His creation's tragedy has forced him into a similarly inescapable cycle, and the buzzing and screaming of his equipment seems to go on for ever, but he's no longer itching.

 Film Three:

"Tales From The Crypt - or - Una, Ernie and E. E. Clive get up to more mad shit, with a guest appearance from Dwight and we hope you have as much fun watching this as we had making it etc." The year after James Whale made "Frankenstein", he worked with Karloff a second time on "The Old Dark House". It might be the film of Whale's I watch most often, and the one I'm most keen to show others. In it, a sexy bunch of know-nothings with their whole lives ahead of them, are forced to take shelter on a dark and stormy night, in the home of an ageing, deranged family and their drunkenly incoherent, psychotic butler, played by Karloff. Thesiger plays the saddest and sanest member of this family, delivering the line "Have a potato" in a way you'll remember for the rest of your life. The year after "Old Dark House", Whale continued his experiments in horror with "The Invisible Man", starring Claude Rains (and hopefully you'll have clocked by now the director's enormous influence on "The Rocky Horror Show"). You never see Rains until the final shot, but you see a lot of Una O'Connor, who plays the landlady of the inn in which his mad scientist holes up, and you see a nice amount of E.E. Clive too, as the head of police. These are the villain's anatagonists, and they're hilarious. Their performances are shrill and dull respectively, but also enormous, and precise, and musically human. To Rains' mad scientist, everyone else in the world is an expendable idiot, but thanks to the strengths of its comic relief, "The Invisible Man" seems more a celebration of us expendable idiots, and I adore both films. Two years later, Whale finally acquiesced to demands for him to make a sequel, and cast E. E. Clive as a burgomaster (as with Maria's parents, a recasting), Una O'Connor as a housekeeper, and Thesiger as Claude Rains. And I'm very happy to see them all back, but I'm not really sure what any of them are doing here.

 Well look, Terry Jones has just died, so I'm in no mood to say anything about O'Connor's Tyrolean pepperpot other than congratulations! But if Thesiger's Dr. Pretorius had not turned up to seek a collaboration with Henry Frankenstein, wouldn't the story still have worked? Would it not in fact have worked even better, with the monster seeking out his creator directly, rather than through a go-between? And while it's Pretorius who toasts to "a New World of Gods and Monsters" what is this newcomer actually bringing to the table, apart from jars of comedy homunculi, and the House of Lords gin? I'm trying to imagine what it would have been like with Rains in the role. Thesiger better suits a dingy attic, but I'd feel a lot more uncomfortable watching Rains handle a tiny king with tweezers...

 ... perhaps because Rains has the air of a sadist, while Thesiger seems more a masochist. It's impossible from me to imagine this Pretorius actually wanting power, so maybe he's just seeking out people even more wretched. This might be why he's at his best in his first encounter with Karloff, picnicking in a crypt, after the monster has fled from the hermit, and returned to the cemetery from "Frankenstein" where he was dug up. Here, Thesiger perfectly communicates the air of someone always found in the worst possible place for a human being to wind up. He's a great host, just a lousy guest.

 One thing he does bring to the table, actually, is Dwight Frye, recast as a bodysnatcher with a string of gallows one-liners... "Pretty little thing in her way, wasn't she"... "This is no life for a murderer" etc... And again, I'm very happy to see Frye back, but when he turns up with a freshly extracted human heart Frankenstein asks no questions either, and so is every bit as culpable as Pretorius – more so in fact, as I doubt Thesiger's sea monkeys ever went on a killing spree. Yet, when the monster is rejected by the bride, it is Henry and Elizabeth who are spared his fit of incel pique, and Pretorius who goes up in smoke. Why doesn't he escape too? No idea. Why does the monster spare the breeding pair? How did Elizabeth get out of those ropes? Why is there suddenly a wooden lever that blows everything up? We're not supposed to ask any of these questions, and if we're honest we know the answer anyway, and it's a shame. It's the film surrendering to straightness. Karloff might have been crucified, but it's Pretorius who dies for all our sins.

 Two more points: Instead of Edward Van Sloan offering a prologue, "Bride" opens rather surprisingly with a poster for the NRA. This was not the National Rifle Association, however, but the extremely shortlived "National Recovery Administration". So, phew! And finally, since this is the last Whale film I'll talk about in this series: It's easy to imagine all classic books ever written came before any films, but, since they didn't, I often enjoy wondering how big an influence the work of this beautiful man (pictured above) and his collaborators may have had upon fantasy literature. Gormenghast, for example, with its deranged, vaudeville grotesques and gothic slapstick. Or even the influence Dwight Frye's murderous, pitiful, gimlet stare may have had upon Smeagol.

 Your homework for next week is 1939's "Son of Frankenstein", in which Karloff gives his final turn as the monster, and we finally get to say "WULL HELLOooo" to Ygor.

"My eyebrows shot up..." (Good day, Mr. Cummings)

"My eyebrows shot up"

Science fiction writer William Gibson, @GreatDismal, says Downing St adviser Dominic Cummings might want to go back and read his books again before recommending the govt employ more people who resemble his characters#r4today | https://t.co/vFkbBqZyfV pic.twitter.com/U6MV3aLh6I

— BBC Radio 4 Today (@BBCr4today) January 20, 2020

 I haven't read William Gibson's "Pattern Recognition", but as an Oxbridge Humanities graduate I bet you anything that when Dominic Cummings refered to its heroine Cayce Pollard as "that girl hired by Bigend" in his horribly-written call-out for "a sort of personal assistant to me for a year" he was comparing himself to Gibson's bullshitting brainiac very consciously. Showily even. He knew exactly what he was doing in that respect at least. But...

Brazil. Charles McKeown (eyebrows shot up). Jonathan Pryce. Magic.

 I also bet you that in not actually naming Cayce Pollard, Dom unconsciously betrayed something far more telling: a deep-seated, adolescent fear of being teased for admitting knowledge of any woman's name because that means you must fancy them. I honestly think the Gove-ian, a-human, legislation-free future the man currently running this country as much as anyone is attempting to spearhead will be this pathetic. I would really like to see which self-styled "weirdoes and misfits with odd skills" do end up responding to his call nevertheless, because I suspect a lot of them will more closely resemble that boy not hired by Kubrick:

 Also, I bet he does fancy her.
 (Also, what Cummings is really after, it seems, is another William Gibson, who got 5 out of 150 in his mathematics SATs. There's a great piece here on how Gibson had to repeatedly postpone finishing his latest book because reality kept overtaking it, which is also my excuse for not writing more Time Spanner.
 [Also, should I apply?
 {Also, "[M]uch"?}])

Felicette, the first cat in space. Jesus!

 In 1963, apparently, France launched a cat into space! I learnt this only yesterday. They had a space programme in the Sahara! Jesus! On her return the cat was apparently euthanised and then autopsied, but the cat filmed being removed from the landing craft seems to have different markings from those of the cat who went up - even the two stamps above show different markings - so maybe she didn't even make it back from the Heaviside layer! Jesus, I don't know.

 It was all filmed, centrifuges, electrodes to the head, the lot. Does the fact she's a cat make this more uncomfortable? Unlike dogs or monkeys, an important part of human interaction with cats is the granting of status, playing along with the idea they're our secret masters and inherently aristocratic. There's none of that here. And absolutely nobody wanted to see it of course, let alone hear it, so history has rather forgotten the first cat in space. People are much more likely to honour a sacrifice if they're not forced to look at it, that's what I learn from the story of Felicette. You have been warned. Jesus...

Giant Robot Scorpion Revisited

 I'm cock-a-hoop that tonight the Doctor finally got to meet the inspiration for Professor Death. As one of the flesh-and-blood archetypes of the "Mad Professor" Tesla had always seemed to me an obvious subject for Doctor Who, and Nina Metivier's episode had it all: Wardenclyffe, the Current War, the signals from Mars, nothing from Tesla's mythos was left unused, Goran Višnjić was a beautiful Nikola, and while it's always been a bit too easy to paint the "inventor of inventing" as the baddie, Graham was just the right choice to finally tear a strip off Edison, but an additional thrill for me was the choice of ultimate villain: Armoured Scorpions of Death!

 I mean it's an absolute coincidence I know, but I loved it. My own sketch complete with giant robot scorpion is underneath, and I've written more about it, and Tesla, and the runny logic of so much of the cult surrounding him (much of which would go on to inspire the mythology of "Time Spanner") here. It's back from when this blog was on myspace though so none of the links work now, sorry. Anyway, didn't they pull out all the stops on this one! I love it.

Fumble Date

 Here's 23 seconds of slapstick from 2005 and the devising process of shunt's Amato Saltone starring Kittens and Wade (to give it its full title). That's me on the left, Layla Rosa on the right. We had the idea to project shadows onto the windows, but none of it was used in the end, so seeing this turn up a decade later on Susanne Dietz's vimeo channel was a lovely surprise.

 I was fine.

Friday riddle. Wait... "00:00" Saturday riddle then (for @mORGANICo_cOM)

 Hope is enormous. Hope is dead...

 Hope is hanging by a thread...

 Still, it finally gets people to go upstairs...

 And why they named it that's nobody's business but theirs.

 Do the photos give it away? I think the photos might give the answer away. And thanks entire to the taker of this last picture for the typically generous and strengthening, but still astonishing, help she organised at the last minute for Seaview, and thank you to everyone else who tried to help Morgan. And thank you, Morgan, for allowing me to be part of its history and for making things nicer with monsters. Here's a short educational film about thriving which you might enjoy. See you in the land of steam, buddy.

Some days this blog will just be something like "Hey, have you seen Two Trenchcoats In A Kid?"

 An incredibly stupid idea, beautifully executed. I literally clapped at the end. Thanks, Eric Fuerer.
 

 If you enjoyed this, Matt Roger's Barking Glass on the same channel also made me loud.

Frankenstein Wednesdays: "Frankenstein" (1931) – That's Life!

Initiating a weekly roam though Universal's first 8 Frankensteins...

"10,000 Thrills Frozen into an Epic of Terror"? What? Who wrote this, me?

 To begin with – and this all comes with a huge dose of "What do I know!" but the only way I can write about this movie is to rave about it, so buckle in – James Whale's 1931 "Frankenstein" is Frankenstein; it simply is, just as Boris Karloff in Jack Pierce's make-up is Frankenstein. It's no more the name of the scientist than "Big Ben" is the name of the bell. No, when you write the word "Frankenstein", you're writing the word for this film, and for this face:

  The Monster enters backwards, he turns, and immediately the camera drags us up into a closeup like a drunken Michael Elphick introducing a sex worker to the Elephant Man. Then it pulls back, and he towers over everyone, and we're terrified for a second or two until we realise that he is completely lost, then we're his. This introduction happens thirty minutes into the film, and epitomises what makes it such an achievement of adaptation: not any fidelity to Mary Shelley's novel written over a century earlier, but the fact its seventy minutes have proven to have had as huge an influence upon Cinema as those hundred odd pages had upon Literature. Wegener's "Golem" had already given us a giant monster brought to life in lift shoes, Wiene's "Caligari" had a gaunt, sleep-walking mute and wonky stairs, Julian's "Phantom" a torch-wielding mob, Lang's "Metropolis" a frenzied scientist bringing a humanoid to life with fancy Art Deco electricity, and Browning's "Dracula" gave us us ruined castles and Dwight Frye, but while all of those films are unquestionable treasures, Whale's "Frankenstein" animated their imagery into something both more primal and more contemporary, by somehow giving it a soul. As I said last week, this film lets us in. This is where the genre "Horror" would finally make its home. This is what it would look like from now on.

 And how do you do, Edward Van "Helsing" Sloan? Apparently, Browning's "Dracula" also had Van Sloan come out in front of a curtain, this time at the end of the film to speak an epilogue, but one can't see that these days because the 1934 Hays Code deemed "THERE ARE SUCH THINGS AS VAMPIRES!" too irresponsible a sign-off, and demanded it be cut from any further reissue, which it was, and then lost. He's on his best behaviour here though. However, any assurances we're about to watch a morally edifying story are of course baloney. We're actually about to watch two stories... Okay, I'll have to talk about the scientist now, so let's say for the sake of protocol that his name is "Frankenstein" and that the name of Karloff's monster is, I don't know... Big Ben. So, one story will tell of Dr. Henry Frankenstein's reponsibility as the son of a tedious be-goitered Baron to provide an heir to the House of Frankenstein. It will be a tale told almost by accident, as I'll discuss later, but that doesn't matter in the end, because the other story will tell of the entirely wretched birth, life and extermination of Frankenstein's actual, unnamed scion, and it is the simplicity of this story that is the film's first strength. It is also why this monster doesn't have to be taught to talk.

 If Whale's vision of the Monster has any literary predecessor, it's not Milton's Lucifer (as suggested by Mary Shelley, and explained at great length in Danny Boyle's incredibly long stage version), it's Pinocchio, but in some hideous upside-downing where Gepetto immediately hates his creation and keeps him chained and tortured in a cellar, only for Pinocchio to escape and then accidentally drown the first friend he meets, before being hounded to death in a burning windmill, having learnt nothing except that life is horrible. Big Ben's pathos is legendary by now, but it should also be noted how brilliantly pitiful Colin Clive is as Henry Frankenstein. Driven like an addict to reject society in pursuit of something he in turn almost immediately rejects, at no point in the film is he actually master of of anything. He can't control his assistant. He can't find his wife. He has nothing to say on the balcony by the burgomaster. In the end he just picks up a torch and joins the mob.

 And he falls on the torch! 

 One would wonder what Elizabeth saw in him, if it weren't so obvious she'll do whatever a Baron proposes. Henry's "best friend" Victor's no better. Rudy Behlmer's Blu-Ray commentary tells us the writers intended for the audience to root for these two, but we don't for a moment since neither of them acts on their love. We're just bored, by them and by the Baron and by their right angles and chintz, waiting to get back to Henry's twisted watchtower and his sadistic assistant. Tastes change, I suppose, and our interest in Elizabeth and Victor might have been helped if Henry had died in the fire along with his creation, as originally scripted. Brilliantly though, Universal's top brass changed this at the last moment, wanting a happier ending but in fact creating a far more depressing ending, by locking Elizabeth into a breeding couple with this drained maniac while the Baron toasts "An heir to the House of Frankenstein!" and Big Ben lies beneath the rubble. (It's not even Colin Clive in the bed in the background, so late was the change.)

 I think it's fine to hate the Baron. Maybe I'm reading too much into these scenes, and Whale simply intended them as comic relief, rather than a powerful argument for abandoning your family and squatting in a ruin while trying to turn yourself into God. But boy do they creak. And Whale can do laugh-out-loud. For proper, lasting comic relief, look to the outstanding Dwight "Renfield" Frye as the doctor's "hunchbacked" assistant Fritz. Not Igor, mind. Fritz. We'll have to wait another couple of films for Igor (and it's worth the wait). Rudy Behlmer says Fritz was first introduced into stage adaptations in 1823, fact fans! But Frye is a total original, and his terrifying maniac has some extroardinarily funny details, like stopping to pull up a sock as he mounts the stairs to the lab, or the cane that's far too short for him, which Marty Feldman would later adopt in "Young Frankenstein". His brain theft was also restaged by Mel Brooks pretty much beat for beat, although I find Frye's negligence even funnier...

 The "abnormal brain" was an innovation of this adaption's, by the way, and complete baloney, at least in terms of framing Big Ben as a natural criminal. Both Whale and Karloff understood how much audiences would sympathise with the monster, and the scene with "Little Maria" clinches it: a living nightmare for everyone involved, as Karloff's goofy grin turns to helpless, screaming confusion.

 What Big Ben's motives actually are after this scene, for seeking out specifically Elizabeth, seem incredibly muddy. Is he looking for Henry? Is he out for revenge for simply being forced to exist? Or is he just terrorising the Frankenstein Home, because the story now demands he do something more monster-y? I suppose we're to understand that Frankenstein (Henry, remember) has created something unsafe, and that the unsafe must be banished. But we can't root for that either. We can't root for anything by this point, because the astonishing Michael Mark – as Maria's father – is now staggering through the festivities of wherever this story is meant to take place, carrying something genuinely too horrible to screengrab: perhaps the most convincing looking casualty I've seen on screen, and a reminder that Tod Browning may have spent his youth buried alive in a coffin as part of a carnival act, but Whale spent his in the trenches.

 On a lighter note, isn't Karloff handsome! He had quite a hand in the look of Big Ben too, asking for fake eyelids, and removing his own dental bridge in order to Bowie himself. It's a hell of a look, and it's extaordinary that Universal, wanting to do for its fortunes what Marvel did with its own "universe", has ignored the very first thing Marvel got right: Make it look like what we know it looks like!  

 And everyone knows what Frankenstein looks like. He looks like Frankenstein.

 Your homework for next week is "The Bride", starring David Rappaport and Sting. Not really. It's 1935's "Bride of Frankenstein" obvs.