Alive!
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As mentioned by Valentino, the Film Classics Library was unique for its frame-by-frame representations of great movies from every genre in book form, giving enthusiasts the opportunity to enjoy their favorites at their leisure, which was the next best thing to screening the features themselves. The studios jealously guarded their work prints (nearly all stills were staged for publicity purposes and not blown up from actual frames, as were these images), making this an important series for the serious student of film. Inevitably, the advent of home video led to the discontinuation of the line; but the FCL is still valuable for quick reference and interpreting passages of dialogue difficult to follow on a soundtrack. Anobile (who in his author’s photo looks somewhat like a 1970s porn star) makes the mistake of assuming that the “lost” segment in which the Monster throws little Maria into the pond, causing her to drown, no longer existed—it has since been restored—and appears to be the only critic who is unimpressed with Whale’s directorial skills; but his dedication to the project speaks for itself. Frankenstein is the gem of a highly collectible set of motion-picture-related literature.
Beck, Calvin Thomas. Heroes of the Horrors. New York: Collier Books, 1975.
Beck (also editor of Castle of Frankenstein, a dourer but more scholarly alternative to Famous Monsters of Filmland) provides valuable capsule biographies of Karloff, the Chaneys, Lugosi, Peter Lorre, and Vincent Price, with rarely seen stills and thoughtful dissertations on the secrets of their art. The checklist of films at the back is particularly useful for quick reference.
Haining, Peter, ed. The Dracula Scrapbook. New York: Bramwell House, 1976.
An inveterate compiler (The Sherlock Holmes Scrapbook, et al), the late Haining takes this seminal figure in world culture all the way from Bram Stoker’s novel through all his incarnations on stage and screen and in comic books and boxes of cereal, with asides on the vampire superstition and disturbing instances of vampirism in real modern life. Through it all lurks the cloaked silhouette of Bela Lugosi, without whom the image would not resonate nearly so much.
Hardy, Phil. The Encyclopedia of Horror Movies. New York: Harper & Row, 1986.
There’s nothing like a compact encyclopedic reference for down-and-dirty research. The titles are arranged alphabetically, but broken down year by year, which creates the minor annoyance of having to look up a film first in the index to determine the year of its release, then looking it up again under that heading; but it’s petty to find fault with hard work and dedication.
Hirschhorn, Clive. The Universal Story. New York: Crown, 1983.
Crown’s folio-size books about the great studios have contributed significantly to the study of movies. This one traces the history of the company that invented Hollywood from 1913 through 1982, with a close chronological narrative and lists of directors, casts, writers, and crews on 2,641 films, with more than 1,200 photos. The passages dealing with the years when Universal dominated the horror field are illuminating and succinct, with no breathless lingering over cherished moments (there isn’t space). Hirschhorn (who also wrote The Warner Brothers Story) set the bar high from the start.
Mallory, Michael. Universal Studios Monsters. New York: Universe Publishing, 2009.
This is a scrumptious (and pricey) volume, paved with glossy black-and-white photos, full-color reproductions of vintage posters, and handy snapshot biographies not only of stars and directors, but of great, often overlooked character actors (Dwight Frye) and technicians (makeup genius Jack Pierce) as well. Lesser entries (The Mole People, Captive Wild Woman, the Creature franchise) are not ignored, providing an in-depth examination of the full texture of the genre the studio practically invented. A gorgeous display item for the living room, this, but it’s destined also to be a staple.
Mank, Gregory William. It’s Alive! The Classic Cinema Saga of Frankenstein. La Jolla, CA: Barnes & Co., 1981.
Mank established himself as the go-to guy for the MagicImage Original Script series and the commentary track on Universal DVDs with this modest-looking coffee-table book. As much as Famous Monsters of Filmland, this affectionate look at the Monster’s passage from Whale’s first direction through Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein brought new recognition to the great collaborative effort, but also respect, even to the final entry; which considering the depths to which Bud and Lou’s reputation had fallen by the 1980s (the ‘70s were all about the Marx Brothers), was no small accomplishment. The material in the appendix tracing the fates of series personnel benefits both the historian and the novelist with historical pretensions.
Skal, David J. Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1980.
This became a classic almost instantly, oxymoronic as the phrase sounds. Like Haining’s The Dracula Scrapbook, it traces the development of the character from novel to stage to screen, but unlike the other it eschews the lore of the vampire itself in order to focus on the Count, with emphasis on the Lugosi interpretation. Other highlights appear, including F.W. Murnau’s silent Nosferatu (1922) and Werner Herzog’s German-language 1979 reinvention of the same title, Christopher Lee’s many appearances in the role, and such related material as the cult favorite 1970s Gothic soap opera Dark Shadows, but only in comparison to Lugosi’s watershed performance. A thorough study of the Broadway production that brought the star to the attention of Hollywood and his later tours with the play is the book’s most significant addition to the growing literature on the subject. Absent Tod Browning’s plodding direction, the reader is left with the conviction that the film would not have aged as badly as it has had Lugosi been given free rein, unrestricted by industry self-censorship. (See comparisons between the English- and Spanish-language versions of the 1931 film, shot almost simultaneously on the same sets, in the Filmography.)
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4. Film Landmarks
Endres, Stacey, and Robert Cushman. Hollywood at Your Feet: The Story of the World-Famous Chinese Theatre. Universal City, CA: Pomegranate Press, 1992.
Grauman’s Chinese Theater—which apparently has reverted to its original name following a generation under egocentric new management as Mann’s—doesn’t appear in Alive!, but the Oracle is a much scaled-down version of the lavishly ludicrous (but no less fabulous for that) motion picture palace that has hosted every great Tinseltown premiere from 1922 to the present day. No excess was spared in the construction of this delirious Xanadu, which is both temptation and torture to one of Valentino’s romantic temperament and limited means. What other attraction in the world offers a diversion to compare with the opportunity of standing in Mary Pickford’s footprints in the courtyard at Grauman’s? Numerous pictures and anecdotes enliven this page-turner, with an effervescent foreword by Ginger Rogers.
Fodor, Eugene, Stephen Birnbaum, and Robert Fisher, eds. Fodor’s Far West. New York: David McKay Co., 1974.
The Fodor books are the modern American equivalent of the Baedecker’s of Victorian Europe. I consult this (admittedly out-of-date; but obsolescence is the Valentinos central theme) guide frequently, for ideas and addresses, which I depend on my computer-literate wife to update via the Internet. This time it gave me the Hollywood Wax Museum. Its official website confirms it’s still at the same stand, doing pretty much what it’s done from the beginning: showcasing a Hollywood that never really existed outside a soundstage. Its quirky homepage includes visitors’ gripes about the (nominal) cost of admission. You have to believe an advertisement that doesn’t blanch at consumer criticism.
Margolies, John, and Emily Gwathmey. Ticket to Paradise: American Movie Theaters and How We Had Fun. Boston: Little, Brown, 1991.
Despite the “aw, shucks” subtitle, this handsome coffee-table item offers a breezy but informative history of the American picture palace and many full-color photos of movie venues from across the continent in their heyday, after restoration, and in sad decline. There’s a whole section on drive-ins— unique to Western culture—and the occasional vis
it behind the scenes, including to projection booths and inside orchestra pits. David Naylor’s Great American Movie Theaters (see Historical under the Bibliography section in Frames’s Closing Credits) is a handy pocket guide to take along on a field trip to the actual sites, but this is a book to curl up with on the sofa and dream.
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FILMOGRAPHY
1. The Classics
Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Directed by Erie C. Kenton, starring Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, Lon Chaney, Jr., Bela Lugosi, Lenore Aubert, June Randolph, Glenn Strange, and the voice of Vincent Price. Universal, 1948.
It was an audacious gamble to link a pair of has-been funnymen with three major horror icons, themselves in decline, but it paid off, leading to a string of thriller-related sequels (A&C Meet the Mummy, A&C Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; plug in your favorite fiend next), catapulting the vaudeville team back to the top of the box office and jump-starting the careers of Lugosi and Chaney. There was no horror-comedy genre before this. It’s staggering to think that this was only the second time Lugosi played Count Dracula on the screen and that he never again assumed the role before a movie camera. Erie C. Kenton gained the distinction of being the only director to helm three Frankenstein films. It’s still funny, and having the ghouls play it straight works, too. Special effects gain their foothold on the form when Dracula transforms into a bat in animation (an elaboration on earlier experiments in the Carradine Draculas and a remarkable scene with Carol Borland opposite Lugosi in Mark of the Vampire, a 1935 remake of Lon Chaney, Sr.’s silent London After Midnight).
Bride of Frankenstein. Directed by James Whale, starring Boris Karloff, Colin Clive, Valerie Hobson, Ernest Thesiger, Elsa Lanchester, and Una O’Connor. Universal, 1935.
Notice the top billing; he was identified by only a question mark in the opening credits the first time around. Four years of acclaim for his performance in the first feature placed his name prominently above the title, simply as “Karloff”; an imperial designation formerly granted only to Garbo, and now shared by music-video superstars Bon Jovi and Cher. (He could only top this honor by being named in the main title, which happened in 1949’s Abbott and Costello Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff, in a textbook example of beating a successful franchise to death.) Whale outdid his earlier triumph in this, one of a handful of sequels to surpass their predecessors. Franz Waxman’s haunting, multifaceted score (Frankenstein had none) unforgettably punctuates every scene. (Rodgers and Hammerstein would baldly plagiarize the Bride’s theme when they wrote “Bali H’ai” for the Broadway musical South Pacific.) Whale’s bold use of comedy never undermines the thrills, as it might have in lesser hands (although one can do without Una O’Connor’s trademark dithering, which nearly sank 1932’s Whale-directed The Invisible Man), and there never was a mad scientist more convincing than Clive, abetted by Thesiger’s Joker-like Dr. Pretorius. Karloff’s concerns about giving the Monster the power of speech were unfounded, as his monosyllabic, Tonto-esque gutturals call attention to his loneliness and actually increase audience sympathy. Lanchester lends idiosyncratic bits of business to the nonspeaking She-Monster, and also to Mary Shelley in a prologue that slyly negates everything to follow as a figment of her imagination. Bride is one of the most entertaining and experimental films of all time.
Dracula. Directed by Tod Browning, starring Bela Lugosi, David Manners, Helen Chandler, Dwight Frye, and Edward Van Sloan. Universal, 1931.
It drops off abruptly when the locale shifts from Transylvania to London, but that’s Browning’s fault. He owes his laurels to Freaks (1932), but that film depends entirely upon its shock value, still potent eighty years after it was banned in Great Britain. For comparison, check out George Medford’s Spanish-language Dracula, photographed on the same sets at night (appropriately) after the English-language version wrapped for the day, and see what a gifted artist could do with identical material, albeit with the less diverting Carlos Villar in the title role. Most of the action is stagebound, kept alive by Van Sloan and Frye—who would team up again a few months later in Frankenstein—but the latter’s Renfield is mesmerizing, unlike just about every other Renfield cast in a part that seems tailor-made for a ham. (A kindly nod to Arte Johnson, who lampooned Frye’s lunatic insectivore so effectively opposite George Hamilton’s urbane Count in 1979’s Love at First Bite, especially his creepy laugh.) Lugosi, of course, galvanizes every scene he enters. Unfortunately, Stoker’s story calls for the central villain to remain offstage most of the time. There is no other Dracula for many, just as Johnny Weissmuller will always epitomize Tarzan despite the occasional presence of better actors in the loincloth. Bela had the chops. He proved it in Son of Frankenstein and Ghost of Frankenstein; but he inhabited the cape (and it inhabited him) more than anyone else before or since. Yes, he was buried in it, at his own request. It’s doubtful anyone else will dare claim that privilege.
Frankenstein. Directed by James Whale, starring Colin Clive, Mae Clarke, Edward Van Sloan, John Boles, Dwight Frye, and Boris Karloff. Universal, 1931.
Boles is a stiff, but the poor schnook’s role was made meaningless by a decision in post-production to have Clive’s Henry Frankenstein survive, depriving best-friend Victor (a mistake in Robert Florey’s first draft of the script transposed the Christian names of Mary Shelley’s characters) of the opportunity to step in and sweep Clarke off her feet. Most of the rest of the cast compensates. Clive’s gaunt, frenzied heretic, Van Sloan’s plummy-voiced skeptic, and Frye’s hunchbacked helper, which created an archetype as enduring as Karloff’s monster (no one but a skilled talent would have thought to ad-lib stooping to pull up his raveled sock in mid-scuttle down a Gothic staircase), provide powerful balance to Clarke’s stoic heroine, surely the most patient bride-to-be in history. (She would attain legendary status that same year by taking half a grapefruit in the kisser from James Cagney in The Public Enemy.) Karloff’s the jewel in the crown. Generations of audiences have identified with his tragic brute, so beautifully drawn despite the painful hindrances of makeup and costume. No one suffered more physical hardship under Whale’s inexplicably vindictive direction, and his name, when it finally appeared on the end title, came dead last. He wasn’t invited to the premiere.
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 smack-down. It’s a pale carbon of the first three in the series, but there’s nary a dull moment.
Ghost of Frankenstein. Directed by Erie 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 Erie 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 Erie 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.