Loren D. Estleman - Valentino 03 - Alive!
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Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. Directed by Roy William Neill, starring Lon Chaney, Jr., Patrick Knowles, Bela Lugosi, Maria Ouspenskaya, Lionel Atwill, Dennis Hoey, and Dwight Frye. Universal, 1943.
It must have galled Lugosi to don the headpiece Jack Pierce created for Karloff a dozen years after he haughtily turned down the part of the Monster in Frankenstein, and to accept third billing behind Patrick Knowles, easily the blandest scientist to succumb to the temptation of reanimating the dead. Because Ygor’s brain had been placed in the Monster’s skull at the end of Ghost of Frankenstein (see below), rendering him blind because of incompatible blood types, it was only natural that his voice should again be heard coming from the brute, and that he play the role as sightless, groping about with arms extended. But his speaking scenes were cut after a disastrous sneak preview, and because they explained his affliction, audiences were perplexed by his stumbling. Chaney added a tragic nuance to the haunted lycanthrope he created in 1941’s The Wolf Man, with Ouspenskaya repeating her performance in The Wolf Man as the old gypsy woman, Maleva. Neill, who also directed the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes series at Universal, brought along Dennis Hoey to represent Scotland Yard yet again, only this time not as Inspector Lestrade. The atmospheric gypsy-violin score from Ghost of Frankenstein was recycled for this first no-holds-barred monster a monster smackdown. It’s a pale carbon of the first three in the series, but there’s nary a dull moment.
Ghost of Frankenstein. Directed by Erle C. Kenton, starring Cedric Hardwicke, Lon Chaney, Jr., Ralph Bellamy, Bela Lugosi, Evelyn Ankers, Lionel Atwill, and Dwight Frye. Universal, 1942.
Chaney comes off as more drunken circus strongman than walking corpse, which may explain why the villagers don’t seem nearly as frightened as they should to find him in their midst. If Frankenstein’s son (Hardwicke) suffers from his father’s derangement, he must be in his depressive phase; he never bothers even to gum the scenery. It’s left to Lugosi to deliver the goods in his second run at Ygor, and he does. He owns every scene he enters, and even when it’s just his voice coming from Chaney’s mouth he manages to steal everything but the lightning rods.
House of Dracula. Directed by Erle C. Kenton, starring Onslow Stevens, Lon Chaney, Jr., John Carradine, Martha O’Driscoll, Jane Adams, Lionel Atwill, and Glenn Strange. Universal, 1945.
House of Frankenstein. Directed by Erle C. Kenton, starring Boris Karloff, J. Carroll Naish, Lon Chaney, Jr., John Carradine, Elena Verdugo, Anne Gwynne, Lionel Atwill, Peter Coe, George Zucco, and Glenn Strange. Universal, 1944.
It’s easy to lump these two together because they’re the same film, although it’s refreshing to see Karloff back, even if it’s only as another mad scientist and not the Monster, who fell to Glenn Strange, a former professional wrestler who would go on to glory in TV westerns as Butch Cavendish, the desperado inadvertently responsible for creating the Lone Ranger, and a permanent gig as Sam, the bartender in Gunsmoke. Carradine is a wonderfully effective Dracula, who in H of D seeks a cure for his vampirism; the screen would not see so regretful a bloodsucker until Francis Ford Coppola’s execrable Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1992. Both films represent a sort of Grand Hotel compilation of box-office champions gathered in one place. Strange, who like Karloff played the Monster three times, claimed to have received pointers from the master about how to handle the part on the set of H of F, but he seems to have patterned himself after Lugosi’s rickety fiend in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man instead. But he looks formidable.
Son of Frankenstein. Directed by Rowland V. Lee, starring Basil Rathbone, Bela Lugosi, Lionel Atwill, Josephine Hutchinson, and Donnie Dunagan. Universal, 1939.
Karloff’s last time in the getup—which this time includes a fleece vest, presumably supplied by goatherd Lugosi—found him unconscious on the operating table for most of the picture, which persuaded him to bow out before the Monster became absolutely comatose, as he nearly did in the five productions to follow. Rathbone, as Frankenstein’s firstborn son, is manic enough for both Clive and little brother Hardwicke (neither of whom appear in this one), especially when playing darts and exchanging verbal barbs with police prefect Atwill and his wooden arm. Toddler Dunagan’s adorable, which is his purpose, no doubt gleefully anticipating a fat part in Grandson of Frankenstein. Atwill and Rathbone would have run away with the whole thing if Ygor weren’t on hand, in a characterization that might have netted Lugosi an Oscar had the Academy taken horror pictures seriously. (Admittedly, the competition was fierce this year, which included Stagecoach, The Wizard of Oz, and Gone with the Wind.)
2. Tributes
Ed Wood. Directed by Tim Burton, starring Johnny Depp, Martin Landau, Sarah Jessica Parker, Patricia Arquette, Jeffrey Jones, and Bill Murray. Touchstone, 1994.
Runaway entertainment, hilarious and moving by turns, and arguably the best movie about heartless Hollywood after Sunset Boulevard (1950). Depp is a giddy force of nature in this biopic as Edward D. Wood, who contrary to popular opinion wasn’t the worst director of all time (I nominate Robert Altman, with Nashville his Plan 9 from Outer Space), but was certainly the most clueless. Martin Landau plays Bela Lugosi in his pathetic extremity, Depp the desperate Orson Welles wannabe who befriends the faded star and makes him the focus of his celluloid atrocities. Murray was never better, Jones surpasses his Austrian emperor in Amadeus, and the re-enactments of Wood’s canon of schlock are sublimely cheesy. Landau earned an Oscar for his unflinching portrayal; another went to makeup artist Rick Baker for matching him so well to the original that authentic close-up footage of Lugosi in White Zombie (1932) is shown undoctored. This gem has done more to resurrect a forgotten icon’s reputation than any dozen comebacks.
Gods and Monsters. Directed by Bill Condon, starring Ian McKellen, Brendan Fraser, Lynn Redgrave, Lolita Davidovich, David Dukes, and Kevin J. O’Connor. Lions Gate, 1998.
Condon won an Oscar for adapting Christopher Bram’s novel Father of Frankenstein, but McKellen and Fraser proved up to the challenge as the haunted James Whale and his naïve confidant; the late Dukes is extremely effective in a critically undervalued performance as Whale’s former lover. Elsa Lanchester, Boris Karloff, Colin Clive, and Ernest Thesiger (Clive and Thesiger in flashback) are perfect physical matches in casting, and Redgrave received honors for playing against type as Whale’s put-upon Greek chorus of a housekeeper. The usually reliable Leonard Maltin reviewed the movie as “Exceptional (if entirely fictional),” but evidently he was unfamiliar with James Curtis’ Whale biography, which appeared about the same time as the film.
(Tip: Next time you host a Halloween party, consider screening Ed Wood and Gods and Monsters back-to-back with E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire (2000), a supernatural take on the filming of F. W. Murnau’s 1922 silent Nosferatu, with John Malkovich as the brilliant European director and an unrecognizable Willem Dafoe as the sinister Max Schreck.)
Young Frankenstein. Directed by Mel Brooks, starring Gene Wilder, Peter Boyle, Marty Feldman, Teri Garr, Madeline Kahn, Cloris Leachman, and Kenneth Mars. 20th Century Fox, 1974.
Wilder, it’s said, sat nearly on Brooks’s head to curb his reckless genius and preserve the integrity of Wilder’s script. If so, he’s to be commended for this spot-on affectionate satire of the first three Frankensteins (with a dash of King Kong during the theater scene; and don’t forget to watch for Ghost of Frankenstein’s Ralph Bellamy in the audience). Everyone is wonderful, and it’s with great difficulty that one picks out a particular highlight, but that would have to be Brooks and Wilder’s hysterical take on the scene in the blind hermit’s (Gene Hackman’s) hut from Bride. Is it just me, or do I hear phantom chuckling from Karloff, Lugosi, Dwight Frye, and company every time I screen it?
(Tip: This one is best enjoyed after watching Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, and Son of Frankenstein in close succession.)
AUTHOR’S NOTES
1. Fun-Ereal Fact
Two films in this sub-genre drew their titles from lines spoken in the
first: both Young Frankenstein and House of Frankenstein from Baron Frankenstein’s (Frederick Kerr’s) toast in the final scene. Hammer Films’s Curse of Frankenstein (1957) was inspired by a villager’s cry in Ghost of Frankenstein.
2. Steams Like Old Times
Steampunk is one of the lighter-hearted youth movements of recent years. Part rebellion against Cyber Age technology, part dress-up, it celebrates the visual contrast of massive moving metal parts glistening with oil with the proper dress, genteel manners, and strict mores of Victorian society. It’s a relatively new phenomenon, so there is little to be found upon the subject between covers. Ironically, one must turn to its bete noir, the Internet, for further information. (But then, hasn’t mankind managed to create its own Frankenstein’s Monster in the form of the microchip?)
3. Frankenstein Meets Dracula
Bela Lugosi’s test as the Monster in Frankenstein is no novelist’s invention. It was shot under Robert Florey’s direction in June 1931, and was by all accounts terrible, drawing derisive laughter from Carl Laemmle, Jr., when Lugosi’s close-up was screened. Although rumored to have been destroyed, it resurfaced (perhaps) thirty years ago in a trade-paper advertisement in Los Angeles, only to vanish once again. In view of the fact that the only poster known to exist promoting Lugosi as the star sold at auction recently for six figures, it’s anyone’s guess what those two reels would bring.
Books by Loren D. Estleman
AMOS WALKER MYSTERIES
Motor City Blue
Angel Eyes
The Midnight Man
The Glass Highway
Sugartown
Every Brilliant Eye
Lady Yesterday
Downriver
Silent Thunder
Sweet Women Lie
Never Street
The Witchfinder
The Hours of the Virgin
A Smile on the Face of the Tiger
Sinister Heights
Poison Blonde*
Retro*
Nicotine Kiss*
American Detective*
The Left-Handed Dollar*
Infernal Angels*
Burning Midnight*
VALENTINO, FILM DETECTIVE
Frames*
Alone*
Alive!*
DETROIT CRIME
Whiskey River
Motown
King of the Corner
Edsel
Stress
Jitterbug*
Thunder City*
PETER MACKLIN
Kill Zone
Roses Are Dead
Any Man’s Death
Something Borrowed, Something Black*
Little Black Dress*
OTHER FICTION
The Oklahoma Punk
Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Holmes
Peeper
Gas City*
Journey of the Dead*
The Rocky Mountain Moving Picture Association*
Roy & Lillie: A Love Story*
The Confessions of A1 Capone* (June 2013)
PAGE MURDOCK SERIES
The High Rocks*
Stamping Ground*
Murdock’s Law*
The Stranglers
City of Widows*
White Desert*
Port Hazard*
The Book of Murdock*
WESTERNS
The Hider
Aces & Eights*
The Wolfer
Mister St. John
This Old Bill
Gun Man
Bloody Season
Sudden Country
Billy Gashade*
The Master Executioner*
Black Powder, White Smoke*
The Undertaker’s Wife*
The Adventures of Johnny Vermillion*
The Branch and the Scaffold*
NONFICTION
The Wister Trace
Writing the Popular Novel
*Published by Tom Doherty Associates
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Loren D. Estleman has written more than sixty novels. He has netted four Shamus Awards for detective fiction, five Spur Awards for Western Fiction, and three Western Heritage Awards. The Western Writers of America recently conferred upon Estleman the Owen Wister Award for Lifetime Contribution to Western Literature. Alive! is the third Valentino film detective mystery. He lives with his wife, author Deborah Morgan, in Michigan.
Learn more at www.lorenestleman.com.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
ALIVE!
Copyright © 2013 by Loren D. Estleman
All rights reserved.
Cover art by Michael Koelsch
Edited by James Frenkel
A Forge Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Estleman, Loren D.
Alive! / Loren D. Estleman.
p. cm.
“A Tom Doherty Associates book.”
ISBN 978-0-7653-3331-5 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-46680064-9 (e-book)
1. Archivists—Fiction. 2. Motion picture film—Preservation—Fiction. 3. Hollywood (Los Angeles, Calif.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3555.S84A75 2013
813’.54—dc23
2012042847
e-ISBN 9781466800649
First Edition: April 2013