Saturday 29 February 2020

dinosaurs, reconsidered


swans

 According to an interesting thought experiment of  "Artist and Researcher" C. M. Koseman's (ah, but are we not all artists and researchers?) this is what a swan would look like "if we drew modern animals the way we draw dinosaurs, based on bones alone". Having questioned this monstering of dinosaurs myself, I would like to support Koseman's work, so here's more of it, accompanied by some relevant ponderings from this post on the old myspace blog back in May, 2009:



 "I ended up at the Natural History Museum. Passing the animatronic T Rex I was struck for the very first time by how bare not only he, but most of the other reconstructions seemed to be...


 "And I passed an illustration of a T Rex sinking its teeth into a hadrosaur and thought - Yes, if we've got that wrong, then that's exactly how we get it wrong: Take what we know about something and paint it killing something else...



 "Seeing the bones, remembering how wrong we might have got it, gazing at a scene of antlered hadrosaurs gathering at the water-hole, all this suddenly made me want once again to see not a clone, but THAT SCENE...


"I wanted a time machine. I wanted to step out of a time machine and see a T Rex at dusk trailing feathers like a peacock and scavenging some long-dead carcass while the hadrosaurs were left to butt heads in peace."




 You can see Koseman's full TED talk here. He's not a natural public speaker possibly, or indeed a scientist, but he's not claiming to be, he's just having some not unhelpful fun with the unknown. I wonder who the woman in the pictures is, whether she's real, or just another of Koseman's speculations. She's there to give a sense of human scale, I know. But, ah, are we not all here to give a sense of human scale?


 Finally, on the subject of dinosaurs actually being lovely, have a listen to this but be warned, it's powerful stuff:


UPDATERY: There is science behind Koseman's work. Ned Mond's just sent me a link it here.

Thursday 27 February 2020

Lionel's Little Lump of Life


 After yesterday's dross, a macarbre palette cleanser. "The Vampire Bat" is a public domain 1933 chiller I came across on Amazon, directed by Frank Strayer and starring Dwight Frye, Fay Wray, Melvyn Delveyn Douglas, and Lionel Atwill as Dr. Otto Von Niemann (a possible relative of the Niemann Karloff would later play in "House of Frankenstein"?): Villagers have been found dead in their beds, two puncture marks to their necks. The locals led by "Frankenstein"'s Burgomaster Lionel Belmore blame vampires, and single out Dwight Frye's village idiot. What's actually been happening however is revealed below, in an astonishingly Lynchian scene that comes out of nowhere and has everything "House of Dracula" lacked. This is the good stuff (that gurgling!) and you can watch more of it, the whole film in fact, on youtube here.

Wednesday 26 February 2020

Frankenstein Wednesday: "House of Dracula" (1945)... Test The Blood of Dracula!

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

"That's IT?!"

 Here is a publicity still of Award-Winning Make-Up Artist Jack Pierce preparing Boris Karloff for 1933's "Bride of Frankenstein"...


 And here is a publicity still of Onslow Stevens (left) making up his stand-in Carey Loftin for "House of Dracula" twelve years later (source)...


 I don't know who made up Onslow Stevens, but my guess is it might also have been Onslow Stevens. There's just something not very Award-Winning Make-Up Artist Jack Piercey about his make-up. I also suspect John Carradine might have done his own make-up as Dracula, although at least in this film the moustache he wears to prove he's read the book stays on.

Not a play. An actual film.

 Digital restoration can be unkind, and Erle C. Kenton's "House of Dracula" does not bear close examination, if any. It is a bad film. So I might just keep talking about the make-up. Onslow Stevens is wearing scientist make-up then because he's playing Dr. Franz Edelmann. Dracula has come to Edelmann because he wants to be cured of Vampirism, or because he has a crush on one of Edelmann's nurses, Miliza, played by Martha O'Driscoll. It's unclear which. Both motives are rubbish. But at least this film doesn't have a misleadingly good opening.

"I wear this top hat so my waddle when ascending or descending stairs might describe an even wider arc. And I ascend and descend stairs a lot"

 Dracula introduces himself as Baron Latos, as he did in "House of Frankenstein", possibly because nobody wants to hear John Carradine say "I am Dracula", or possibly because he's trying to conceal his true identity. He's moved his coffin bearing the Dracula crest into Edelmann's cellar though, and shown it to Edelmann the moment they meet, so it's probably the former. Edelmann, a Man of Science, believes that Vampirism is simply a mental disorder and so prescribes a series of transfusions of his own blood into Dracula's as a cure. 


 But (?) Dracula then tricks (?) Edelmann by reversing the flow of the syringe (?) which (?) transforms the good doctor into Jekyll and Hyde. You can see the make-up for Edelmann's hideous transformation in the image at the top of this post. Below is another example. I have literally no idea what anyone was thinking at this point.

  "Push the button, Frank!"

Also, who in red hell is Onslow Stevens, and why is he the star of this film? Anyway, believing in vampires now, the good doctor moves Dracula's coffin into the sunlight, killing its occupant, and that's the end of Dracula's stupid story that makes no sense. Larry Talbot meanwhile (Lon Chaney of course) has also come to Edelmann looking for a cure for his Werewolfism, which makes a bit more sense, although both he and Dracula definitely died in the previous film. Edelmann is busy with "Baron Latos" however, so Talbot hands himself over to the local police, and then transforms into a wolf man, but it's fine because he's locked up safely in a cell now. He doesn't escape or anything. Nobody is killed. It's all fine, and so is his make-up.

 "This is actually fine."

 If the Wolf Man looks a little bushier than before it's because, according to The Titus Andronicus Project, the war caused a serious shortage of the European yak hair that Pierce had previously relied on, but the make-up's still basically fine. Talbot is then released from prison and throws himself into the sea. Edelmann lowers himself down on a winch to look for him in the mud, finds the reliably unconscious body of Frankenstein's Monster, and brings both back to his not mad hospital/lab/castle, where he does not revive the Monster, because another nurse, Nina (played by Jane Adams) points out that this would be bad, but he does cure Talbot, which is good, and the end of the Wolf Man's story.

"You have been cured with spores. Now I love you."

 We haven't seen a moustache on Talbot before, but he obviously has every right to try one. Perhaps he'd just seen "A Matter of Life and Death" and hoped that, combined with silk pyjamas and a brain surgery bandage, it might make him look more like David Niven, and not Houdi Elbow. It looks real anyway. Martha O' Driscoll and Jane Adams both look superb, but that doesn't mean they didn't also do their own make-up. Jane Adams really sells the hump too. Her performance as Nina is probably the best thing in the film, which is not to say that her role of "HUNCHBACK" isn't exploitative and infantilising, but she manages to make Nina the protagonist of ever scene she's in regardless - heroic, if childishly heroic - until she's horrifically thrown down a trapdoor at the end by evil Edelmann and dies, in long shot, because this film is bad.


 Glenn Strange's make-up as the Monster is absolutely fine too, athough yet again he has absolutely nothing to do except lie unconscious on a gurney for the duration of the film until he breaks out of some straps when a mad scientist revives him, so there's probably not much that could have gone wrong. If his firey death the following minute, trapped beneath some Linda Barker shelves, reminds you of the end of "Ghost of Frankenstein", that is because it's the end of "Ghost of Frankenstein". The studio simply recycled the footage. And that's the end of the Monster's non-story. It doesn't look like Strange was given a dresser either.

"Lon Helping Glenn into his Costume" Actual caption.

 Lionel Atwill probably did some recycling too, wearing the same uniform for Inspector Holtz that he'd worn for Inspector Arnz in "House of Frankenstein" and Inspector Krogh in "Son of Frankenstein", while Skelton Knaggs, as this film's sweaty weirdo the whole village listens to instead of their Police Inspector, is a new face, and I'm not sure anyone did his make-up. I don't think he's wearing any. I think that's just Skelton Knagg's deal.



 Anything else? Oh, there's one other death; a scene in which the evil Edelmann toys with, and then murders, his gardner. And for that one scene we're reminded of the queasily attractive power fantasy promised by Horror, and what Steven Moffat calls "the game of the monster". House of Dracula forgot the rules of that game. There was no sequel the following year. And while there's so much more to the best of these films than this game, you still have to play it. It's through this game in fact that we first came to Frankenstein and Dracula and the Wolf Man as children, not through "Scooby Doo". Exactly as we might have dressed up as super heroes, we groaned and hissed and adopted the stiff walk and suddenly felt power because people were running from us, because that was the game. And the fangs, and the claws and the face paint and the stick-on bolts and the scars were the toys we bought to play that game. We learnt of these monsters through make-up.









Next week... "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Dracula and The Wolf Man" in which a comedy finally comes along to sort all this shit out. And then we're done!

Tuesday 25 February 2020

Scene From The Opening of Scrappy Doo That Nobody In Britain Got To See

 In a comment to last week's Drunk Women in Werewolf of London post, I said I'm "not particularly into being scared. What I like about 'Horror' is that it's high-stakes magical realism in which a happy ending is not guaranteed." But thinking about it more, I realise my interest in the genre, or at least that pantheon of old monsters, runs a lot deeper. This for example is very first drawing I made on page one of my very first school book:

 

 Over the page is the second drawing I ever made at school, which goes some way towards explaining the first:


 So I've been looking through old Scooby Doo title sequences to see where this image might come from. "Scrappy Doo" debuted the year it was drawn, and I remember there being a mummy in that, because Scrappy unwraps it in a single whisk. Rewatching the titles, it turns out I recalled them pretty much shot for shot, except for one shot towards the end which surprised the hell out of me. It's of Daphne, Shaggy, Fred and Velma waiting nervously in A&E...


 This definitely did not make it into the British broadcasts. I've checked. Instead, we got Scooby and Shaggy running down more corridors. Nor did we get this:


 And I'm fine with that; it is an incredibly weird thing to include in the opening titles of a cartoon about monsters, and Scrappy's offputting enough without hauling casualties of his own recklessness out of their hospital beds. Still it's nine minutes into this if you want to see for yourself, and you are, as ever, welcome:


 Tomorrow we'll look at "House of Dracula", and maybe talk a little more about white plastic fangs. Oh, and this was on page three:


 I'm a dinosaur that's also a jockey? I've no idea.

Monday 24 February 2020

The Third Person





 Nostalgia is poison, but James Bachman is the best and it's his birthday today so let's have a look at him, proving yet again how much easier I found it to write for the already brilliant-to-write-for Robert and Dave with James in the mix. He is the perfect clownish complement to Mitchell Webb's bitter double-act, joining one to soften the outnumbering of the other, ramping up the silliness, or single-handedly setting the scene until the absurdity kicks in as he does in Linden Trees and Carpathian Open Mic Night. There's no one who can do what he does funnier, and there's nothing funny he can't do: Open Mic Act, General Agnew, Guitarist (and composer, thank you!), Ivan son of Abraham, Hello Kitty, Maurice Pang (I stole him from Green Clarinet), Jeremiah Internet, Michael Works-in-a-bank, Piers, the list goes on FOR YEARS AND YEARS, WE DIDN'T JAMES THE BACHMAN, HE WAS ALWAYS STORMING SINCE THE WORLD WAS FORMING! Et cetera. The Caesar Sketch is probably my favourite thing written for the three of them so I've tweaked it here to be a bit more roseate and, I dunno, I had the technology and just always saw David coming on from stage right in my head, and this is my blog, okay? Anyway happy birthday, James, you beautiful bloody instrument!



 Oh, and I haven't even mentioned Bleak Expectations.

Sunday 23 February 2020

Sung Blog Sunday! (I have discovered GarageBand.)

 Last night I finally found out that my laptop had GarageBand. Or maybe I always knew that, maybe I only finally decided to start mucking around with it last night. Anyway I'm not saying this will be a weekly thing, but here is Soundcloud User 90038426's my first ever GarageBand track (I've just worked out how to change the user name), inspired by grafitti I saw on Thursday (pictured below, artist unknown) and the evening stroll on which I saw it. Maybe I'm not really a writer, maybe I'm a singer. Let's find out. (Cover art by Klaus Bürgle.) 


Saturday 22 February 2020

Has Everyone Reading This At Some Point Had One of These in Their Mouths?


 If you have, perhaps you'd like describe your first experience of it in the comments below. Thank you in advance for taking the time to answer this survey.

Friday 21 February 2020

Some days this blog will just be something like "Hey, have you heard of Loriot?"


Ten seconds from Loriot's "Ödipussi" (1987)

 Morning! I hadn't heard of him until last week, but continuing with the unintentional theme of German enertainers, below is a wordless sketch from the late Vicco von Bulow, or Loriot, a writer, comedian and animator for whom I can't think of any English-speaking equivalent. This is why I always sit in the seat I have been allocated. Also, interruptions are funny.


Thursday 20 February 2020

The Pediscript

 

 Carl Herman Unthan completed "Notes From the Life of an Armless Man" when he was seventy-seven. He called it a "pediscript" because he'd typed it with his feet. During the First World War, according to this article, he served with the German Army "in a morale role" visiting new amputess, but he was chiefly a Vaudevillian, and in 1913 his typing skills, and more besides, were recorded for posterity when he was cast as Arthur Stoss in the Danish silent film "Atlantis", at the age of sixty-five. I'm not too sure about my choice of music to accompany this footage, but I do think Carl is cool.

"Although his abilities were impressive, critics of Atlantis felt his appearance in the film was simply extraneous and non-integral to the story." Wikipedia

Wednesday 19 February 2020

Frankenstein Wednesdays: "House of Frankenstein" (1944)... The Things That Wouldn't Die

  Continuing my weekly "But What Do I Know" through Universal's first 8 Frankensteins...
 
"Ta-daa! Is this what you like? We've no idea any more."

 There's a reason I tend to write more about the begininnings of these films than their ends. This one opens superbly. Boris Karloff is back from his theatrical sabbatical. We see nothing but his hand first, just as we did when first introduced to him in "Frankenstein" thirteen years earlier. It shoots out from the hatch of a dungeon cell to throttle a jailor, then Karloff's astonishing brow, wreathed with filth and hair, follows and then the voice, that unaltered South London lisp, sepulchral but local (the ghoul next door), slow and yet entirely without vibrato, unwavering as entropy: "Nowwww will you give me my CHALK?" Karloff is given his chalk, and we move into his cell, a beautifully realised early example of the trope of mad scrawlings on a prison wall. How mad? Well, he's working out how to put a human brain into the skull of a dog.

 I just photographed the television.

 By now Karloff was as iconic as the Monster he'd created. He'd just finished playing Jonathan Brewster onstage in "Arsenic and Old Lake", the murderous victim of some botched plastic surgery which had left him looking like Boris Karloff. That's how iconic he was. (Beautifully, when the play went on tour the role was taken over by Bela Lugosi.) He was the consummate maniac therefore, and so while his Top Trump Type: "Mad Doctor" was billed fifth on the poster below, the actor himself was the biggest draw, and  topped the bill accordingly.

I can't tell who the woman is. Also, this film doesn't really like women.

 This would also be Karloff's last Horror Film for Universal, however, because... huhhh... not just because this was directed by "Ghost of Frankenstein"'s Erle C. Kenton, but that can't have helped. The more recent "Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman"'s director, Roy William Neil, was busy with the updated Sherlock Holmes pictures starring Basil Rathbone, extraordinarily rewatchable shorts rich in dark character and macarbre detail that benefitted hugely from a solid appreciation of the importance of goodness and evil in a shocker. It's those Holmes films, still many fans' favourite - if not definitive - interpretation of the detective, that stand as Universal's best contribution to the B Movies of this period. "House" meanwhile (the abbreviation, not the TV show) has some superb stuff in it, but doesn't seem to notice. It lacks care, and there's a sense it only existed because audiences still seemed to like this kind of thing. For a few beautiful moments though at the beginning, it looks like this might actually become the theme of the film. Let's return to those moments then.


 Everything crumbles on the continent, and the lightning that gave Karloff life in "Frankenstein" immediately sets him free by striking his prison. He is accompanied in his escape by the poster's promised "HUNCHBACK!", hoping for a better body to put his brain in. This is Daniel, played by J. Carrol Naish. He has lovely, big eyes and horrible hair. (Returning to the poster quickly; more than the promise of a returning character, a monster on a poster promises a returning story: "The MAD DOCTOR" will be destroyed by his own hubris therefore, "The WOLF MAN" will look for an escape from his curse even in death, "FRANKENSTEIN'S MONSTER" will go wrong, "DRACULA" will try and steal your wife, and "The HUNCHBACK" will swing from awnings and suffer unrequited love for a gypsy, which is exactly what happens to Daniel.) He and Karloff's Professor Niemann, a protegé and fan of the original Doctor Frankenstein, escape into the rain (a welcome attention to detail in a Kenton film) and immediately encounter a travelling Circus of Horrors run by former Moriarty actor George Zucco in a fez.


 This is where things get interesting, and we've aleady had Boris Karloff give a lecture on transplanting a human brain into a dog followed by an exploding prison. The star exhibit of Lampini's two coach carnival is the actual skeleton of Dracula, who in this film is an "old legend" rather than a recent casualty. But nobody believes it. "Doubts! Jeers! Cries of Fake! Fake!" Lampini complains of his audience, and who can blame them? And that's what I find interesting, that Horror now found itself occupying the same simultaneously real and pretend narrative space as Father Christmas...


... That the authenticity of Lampini's sideshow suggests that all cheap sideshows are authentic, that there are two worlds, the world of the story and the world of the audience, with the sideshow as threshold, perhaps even the same threshold diagnosed as "MAD" in the poster's "MAD DOCTOR", an incredibly potent idea in the future of Horror writing, which this film inevitably does absolutely nothing with. A familiar refrain now: God, what a film this might have been.

This shot, while included in the film, is arguably better than it.

 But no, it's simpler than that. Niemann just needs transport, and so he has Daniel strangle Lampini and the caravan driver and steal their identities. A vampire might also come in handy to help Niemann exact his revenge on the Burgomaster who imprisoned him and the former colleagues who testified against him, even though Daniel appears a perfectly adequate murderer, and so Niemann also removes Dracula's stake. Veins appear in the coffin, followed by muscle, followed finally by the suave Pez dispenser John Carradine, licking his lips. He has clearly read Bram Stoker's "Dracula" in preparation for this role and has the moustache to prove it.

"I don't need to say the line, 'Look into my eyes.'
 I can just say it with my eyes. Look. 
I am such a great Dracula."

 Holding the stake over Dracula's heart, Niemann promises to look after his coffin. "In that case I will do whatever you wish," is the Prince of Darkness' reply. And... yeah. Okay, it's rubbish but here's how I think we're supposed to watch this: Dracula's back, let's not worry how or why, let's just have some Dracula for a bit and treat this as a portmanteau film, a series of stories rather than a single... you know... Let's have some fun with Dracula and see if it's interesting if he's just sort of unremarkable on the surface this time, just thin and randy, and watch him turn into a bat and get invited into a house and talk to a lady about his sexy world of the dead and give her a magic ring and leave holes in Sig Ruman's neck and then get chased so hard by the police that his carriage disintegrates and let's also keep this shot in:


 In fact let's return to this shot where his moustache has come off a couple of times actually, and then the sun rises and he turns into a skeleton and the magic ring falls off so we definitely know the story's over and that it's had no consequence on any of its survivors, and then let's get back to Niemann, who ditched Dracula's coffin anyway.


 Which we do. Niemann and Daniel have arrived in the village of Vasaria so that Niemann can pick up Frankenstein's old notebooks. Actually, in this film the village is called Frankenstein, but there's the burst dam and castle from "Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman" so the film's definitely wrong, and I'm right and this is Vasaria. Niemann also finds Frankenstein's Monster and the Wolfman frozen in the ice beneath the ruins, presumably because people really liked the ice in the last film. No wait, this is the same ice cave as before, isn't it? Is it? It's hard to keep track.


 Niemann and Daniel's descent into the glacier is a beatifully orchestrated set piece though, with the land giving way beneath Daniel entirely convincingly. It's a crumbling world, and Karloff particularly is dressed for it superbly... But again, the still deserves a better film:


 The Ice Melts then, and Lon Chaney's Larry Talbot the Wolf Man resumes consciousness and is natually depressed to find himself still alive a third time. He explains what happened in the previous film - refers to Dr. Mannering, the whole kaboodle - and Niemann promises.... Do you know what? I can't remember... to look after his shoes or something, if Talbot helps the two of them cart Frankenstein's handily unconscious Monster to Niemann's own lab in the village of Visaria. With an "i". That's just the name of Niemann's village. Some villages have similar names. It's a hundred kilometers away, and joining them will be the gypsy Ilonka, played by Elena Verdugo. Trying to write about how she fits into this won't be pretty, but there were gypsies in Vasaria, not the gypsies of 'The Wolfman", but one-dimensional subhuman stereotypes, one of whom Daniel saved from a whipping. So now she's with them, and very grateful, and very playful. She tickles the driver's ankle, that kind of thing, and when Larry Talbot takes over the driving from Daniel, romantic complications ensue. The War is definitely not a thing.

Braining Bad.
Cinematographer George Robinson also shot "Frankenstien Meets the Wolfman",
which might be why all this looks so great.

 We arrive in Visaria, and Daniel kidnaps Niemann's two former colleagues, Ullman and Strauss (MICHAEL MARK!) while Frankenstein's Monster is being "preserved" with steam back in Niemann's pub tat strewn laboratory, a gig even Monster actor newbie Glenn Strange couldn't be arsed to lie down for, so an old Lon Chaney mask is glued to a dummy to serve as the Monster until the story can work out what to do with him. Daniel loves Ilonka. Ilonka loves Larry Talbot. Daniel wants his brain put into Larry Talbot's body. Professor Niemann wants to put the Monster's brain into Larry Talbot's body, Ullman's brain into the Monster's body, and Larry Talbot's brain into Strauss' body. It's like The Seagull. Talbot then transforms into the Wolf Man in front of a mirror and kills a Visarian. The mob get their torches. Talbot has a nice scene explaining to Ilonka that he absolutely remembers what it's like to be the Wolf Man, and what it's like wanting to kill, and also, having accompanied Niemann all this distance in the hope of finding a science that can put him out of his misery, that the only way he can be killed is by a silver bullet shot by someone who loves him WHICH IS NEWS TO ME. Anway, that then happens.


 The Wolf Man attacks Ilonka, she shoots him, they both die. It was by far Larry Talbot's least creepy relationship with a woman. Daniel is left heart-broken. The End. Surely. No wait, Frankenstein's Monster is still strapped to the gurney! And speaking of gurny:


 Daniel then takes his grief out on Niemann, who hasn't done a damn thing for him despite all his helpful murders. Niemann lied to him and he lied to Dracula. In fact I'd love to believe Niemann was secretly a complete quack all along, which is why he keeps everyone waiting for their new brains in Visaria. He never actually performs a transplant after all, and while the Monster is revived, Talbot was also revived without any boffinry. But the Monster clearly considers Niemann his saviour, so I suppose the film did as well. Glenn Strange wakes with a face like a landed fish, mouth wide and soundless, interestingly incapacitated. Is he smiling? Or did Karloff teach him that silent scream? Or wait, is he going for palsy? Anyway he bursts from his restraints and throws Daniel out of the window. Like Dracula, he is now just another of Niemann's henchmen. The mob arrive and set fire to the bog. The Monster escapes, dragging the unconscious Niemann out of his lab, and into some quicksand. Everyone loves this mess and so Universal have to make yet another one. Karloff, intensely aware that Horror is allowed to be anything but mediocre, goes off instead to work on some extraordinary collaborations with Val Lewton at RKO, "Isle of the Dead", "Bedlam" and "The Bodysnatcher". Bobby Pickett records "The Monster Mash". The BBC ban it. The End.



 Your homework for next week is 1945's "The House of Dracula". There will be blood. I'm not actually suggesting you watch it though, I'd never want to be responsible for that, but now I've said that, aren't you curious? I mean, everyone died in this one, how will they come back? And will John Carradine be Dracula again? Will his top hat turn into a bit of a bat? Will I ever get round to writing about the Wolf Man make up? Is Frankenstein even in this bloody one? Will it be a really short blog? Find out.

Tuesday 18 February 2020

A Salute to the Many Excellent Drunk Women Portrayed in "Werewolf of London" (1935)


Apologies for the low resolution. I tried to put this on youtube, but it all got blocked. 

Featuring:
 Spring Byington as Ettie Coombes ("Shh.") whose work in this film is as good as anything out of Lee Strasberg.
 Charlotte Granville as Lady Forsyth ("Please don't yank me, Paul.")
 Maude Leslie, as Mrs. Charteris ("I simply jitter to go to Java.") or at least I'm assuming that's who this character is. I'm not sure she and Lady Forsyth are that drunk either.
 Jeanne Bartlett as Daisy ("Give me a nice kiss, Alf."). Definitely meant to be drunk, but again I'm only assuming from IMDB that this is "Daisy".
 Ethel Griffies as Mrs. Whack ("Is your tripe tough, Mrs. Moncaster?")
 Zeffie Tilbury as Mrs. Moncaster ("Spear the canary with a fork.") These two I'm sure about; they're very good about saying each other's names.
 And Tempe Pigott ("I want two gins for two ladies"), credited simply as "Drunk Woman" on IMDB which is a bit rich in this company.
 Parenthetically, in contrast to all the superb character work above, the film's two werewolves, Warner Oland and Henry Hull, appear to have been genuinely paralytic for most of the filming, making their many conversations about the fictional plant Mariphasa Lupina Lumina particularly nail-biting.

"Mariphasa... Lupina... Lumina..."

 Screenplay by John Colton from a story by Robert Harris. Direction by Stuart Walker. Second viewing by means of the Wolf Man boxset at Peter Davis and Laura Marshall's, where I finally gave this film the attention it was due. Excellent party. Peter's just extended his horror podcast output, by the way. "Horror Movie Maniacs" pleases me greatly, and might please you too. And the Hellraiser-inspired audio guignol that he and fellow maniac Phil wrote and produced, "Piercing The Veil", in which I got to play an absolute rotter, is still audible here.

Sunday 16 February 2020

Frankenstein Postlude: My Brain's Goofy Stage


 Here's something I found unposted from 2015: I had my brain scanned. It was an experiment in which I had to lie in a tube playing word association games every five minutes, in between which my brain was supposed to wind down while I counted to twenty. I found the counting surprisingly difficult, knowing I was being scanned; it's one of the most basic things to forget, and there are very few clues to find your way back into it if you've simply forgotten how to count. Afterwards I was shown the inside of my head, which was great fun. Yours is probably not dissimilar. Enjoy.


It should play.

Frankenstein Wednesdays Saturday: "Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man" (1943)... Scavengers Dissemble!

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

Bela Lugosi ISn't The Frankenstein's Monster!

  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.


 Ã–tzi 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.





 To Elsa's right, bearing down on Maleva, is Dr. Frank Mannering from Cardiff, played by Patrick Knowles, and he loves Science. He's been after Talbot ever since the latter fled his hospital to tour central Europe with a band of gypsies in 1943 looking for death. (Knowles also played the fiancé of Talbot's love interest in "The Wolf Man", which contributes beautifully to the sense of oppression felt by Talbot waking in care after years of oblivion.) Dr. Frank has pursued Talbot by following his "trail" in the newspapers, which suggests Larry must have continued to kill while on the road with Maleva, and also that every damn night has a full moon... Finishing off the role call, between Maleva and the black-clad policeman Guno on the right, yes, that's Dwight Frye! In lederhosen. One site credits his character as "Rudi the Tailor", but I can't find any evidence elsewhere of a profession for him. There are some excellent clothes in Vasaria though, so it's nice to think Rudi might have had a hand in them. This is the last we'll see of Dwight Frye on Frankenstein Wednesdays. I love Dwight Frye. So it goes.

  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.