It was an enormous success, and deservedly so. And coming right after Lugosi’s Dracula, it inspired Hollywood’s imitators to create a whole cycle of horror movies. The first actual sequel was the admirable Bride of Frankenstein (1935), in which a frizzy-wigged Elsa Lanchester was brought to life as a companion for the lonely monster—and rejected him. Then, almost inevitably, came Son of Frankenstein (1939). But the horror stars were believed to transcend their roles. Universal combined Karloff and Lugosi in its far-fetched version of Poe’s The Black Cat (1934) and The Raven (1935). By the end of the 1930’s, though, the endless reworking of the formulas had become rather tiresome. Dracula had given birth to Son of Dracula (written by Siodmak) and Dracula’s Daughter; The Invisible Man had led to The Invisible Woman (also by Siodmak); The Mummy reappeared in The Mummy’s Hand; The Werewolf of London evolved into The Wolf Man, and then came Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (Siodmak again).
Karloff, who appeared in some of these things, and worse, was always very professional (he was one of the founders of the Screen Actors Guild and took pride in possessing membership card number nine), but he did wonder why all the mad-scientist plots had to be so similar: “A man who gets hold of [an] idea,” as he put it, in a quite unconscious analogy to the Hollywood view of the rise of fascism, “where if he can work it out right (some new force, new medicine, or a new way of operating) it will be of enormous value to mankind at large. But he becomes fanatical about it, and the thing goes wrong, and he goes wrong with it. He goes off his head, and reluctantly, in the last act, you have to destroy him. . . .” Perhaps better writers might concoct some new ideas, Karloff suggested to Harry Cohn, who had signed him up for a series of thrillers at Columbia. “He was in an expansive mood,” Karloff recalled. “He opened the desk drawer and pulled out a great chart. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘here’s your record. We know exactly how much these pictures are going to make. They cost so much. They earn so much. Even if we spent more on them, they wouldn’t make a cent more. So why change them?’ ”
The one man who tried to change this system, early in the 1940’s, was Val Lewton, a Russian-born writer of poetry and short stories, whose history of the Cossacks somehow led David Selznick to hire him as a consultant on a projected film version of Gogol’s Taras Bulba. Nothing ever came of that, but Lewton began earning credentials as an executive. RKO decided in 1942 to make a series of cheap thrillers and put Lewton in charge of them. Then, in typical Hollywood style, Charles Koerner, the head of the studio, met somebody at a party who suggested that he should make a movie called Cat People. The next morning, Koerner passed that on to Lewton as an order, and Lewton called together a few friends and said, “I don’t know what to do.” When Cat People was remade in the 1970’s, there was much gory clawing to suit the modern sensibility, and that was probably what Koerner wanted from Lewton, but it was not what Lewton was willing to produce. “The only way he would do it,” said Jacques Tourneur, who eventually directed the film, “was not to make the blood-and-thunder cheap horror movie that the studio was expecting but something intelligent.” The script that Lewton eventually got from DeWitt Bodeen was ominously ambiguous: A fashion designer, played by Simone Simon, thought she was descended from a group of women who could turn themselves into cats, but though the studio eventually insisted on one shot of a real panther crouching for the kill, it remained uncertain at the end exactly what Miss Simon’s supernatural powers were.
That was the trademark of Lewton’s films: a horrendous title to please the studio and a story that suggested but never demonstrated the implications of the title. Bodeen had written a play about the Brontës, so Lewton commissioned a script loosely based on Jane Eyre, which did very nicely under the title I Walked With a Zombie (1943). And though The Leopard Man (also 1943) implied that a series of murders in New Mexico might have been committed by a runaway leopard, the most frightening scene was one in which a girl was forced by her mother to go and get some groceries after dark, and walked in terror through the empty streets, and managed to carry the groceries home, and only then encountered the horror, of which the audience heard only an animal snarl and saw only a trickle of blood.
If Lewton wanted to be enigmatic, the RKO chiefs decided, he would have to be provided with a moneymaking star, and so they presented him, to his ill-concealed dismay, with Boris Karloff. Lewton hated monster movies, hated all the clichés that his bosses and his audiences loved, and so he cast Karloff in three strangely sadistic films, The Body Snatchers and Isle of the Dead (1945) and Bedlam (1946). This last one, in which Karloff played the cruel warder of the celebrated London insane asylum and ended being walled up alive by his patients, was so grim that the British censors banned its release there for years. In a sense, they were right, for most horror movies have a tendency toward morbidity, and the nearer they get to reality, the more dangerous that tendency becomes.
The classic horror films were not really supposed to be horrible. They were mildly symbolic legends, fairy tales, and so, when Boris Karloff sent John Carradine off to wreak vengeance on his prosecutors in The House of Frankenstein, Carradine remained (except when he occasionally turned into a large bat) an elegant figure in evening dress. As he showed his magic ring to Mayor Russmann’s beautiful daughter-in-law, she looked admiringly at it and said, “I see glimpses of a strange world where people are dead.” Carradine pressed the ring on her, naturally, and then she said, “I see your world more clearly now. I am no longer afraid.” And he said, his eyes glittering, “I shall return for you before the dawn.”
Who could object? Only her stodgy husband, who had been poking around in the wine cellar for something to offer the distinguished guest, then came upstairs to find his wife embracing the vampire in the garden and departing in the vampire’s coach. And then, in a wonderful but unconscious parody of all chase scenes, the husband set out to find help and soon joined forces with some mounted police, and though these horsemen should have been able to catch the vampire’s coach in good time, the camera lovingly portrayed an interminable pursuit. Carradine was trying, of course, to return before sunrise to the coffin in Professor Lampini’s wagon, filled with the ancestral Transylvanian soil. But the pseudo Lampini (Karloff) wanted to flee from any difficulties with the authorities. And so there followed the extraordinary spectacle of the galloping police somehow unable to overtake the vampire’s much slower coach, and the vampire’s coach unable to overtake Karloff’s still slower circus wagon. Karloff eventually decided to throw out the vampire’s coffin, and Carradine then tried to stop his carriage, which promptly fell on its side. As the dawn sky brightened, Carradine crawled toward his coffin, and the first rays of the rising sun turned his outstretched hand into the bones of a skeleton.
And that was just the first half hour of The House of Frankenstein. The remarkable thing was that Siodmak, the master of sequels and spin-offs, managed to include here not just a sampling of horror-movie clichés but virtually every cliché that existed. When Karloff and the hunchback duly reached the house of Frankenstein, they found not only the mechanical monster frozen in ice but also a frozen werewolf, left there at the conclusion of Siodmak’s Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. They lit fires and thawed out the Wolf Man, who promptly returned to his “natural” form as an amiable if bewildered-looking young man named Lawrence Talbott (Lon Chaney, Jr.). Karloff’s first order of business, though, was to punish the authorities who had incarcerated him, and now that he had lost the services of John Carradine, he reverted to his traditional weapon, the brain transplant. “The monster is put in a glass case where steam will soften his frozen tissues,” according to one synopsis of the unsynopsizable, “while Niemann and Daniel capture Strauss and Ullmann, the last remaining witnesses against the doctor. Niemann removes their brains for his fiendish plan of revenge. Ullmann’s is to be inserted into the Monster, the Monster’s brain into Talbott, and Talbott’s into Strauss. . . .”
The one monster left out of this game of musical brains was Daniel, the homicidal
hunchback, to whom Karloff had originally promised, before he got so involved in brain transplants, a handsome new body. This was particularly important to the hunchback because he had just fallen in love with a zaftig Gypsy girl named Ilonka, and she ignored him because she herself had just fallen in love with the burly Talbott. Talbott morosely confessed to her that he had a problem, which only she could solve by shooting him with a silver bullet when he came in pursuit of her at the next full moon. Quick shot of full moon scudding through clouds, then one of those wonderful sequences in which Jack Pierce’s makeup magic made the whiskers sprout and the fangs grow. Lo, the snarling Wolf Man.
Ilonka was a little hesitant about firing her silver bullet, so she was clawed to death before she managed to do her duty. This outraged poor Daniel, who had now lost the main incentive for the new body that Karloff had been too busy to give him. Daniel lugged the girl back to Karloff’s laboratory, intending to demonstrate the mad doctor’s guilt and then to kill him. This intrusion in the midst of Karloff’s effort to reactivate the Frankenstein monster naturally aroused the hostility of the reviving monster, who lurched off his laboratory table, grappled with the frenzied hunchback, and finally flung him out a window. By now, of course, it was time for Siodmak’s last cliché: the crowd of villagers marching toward the accursed castle with all their torches ablaze. And so on.
One last question: How could Boris Karloff, the original Frankenstein monster, play the role of the mad scientist bringing the frozen monster back to life? The fact is that Karloff had tired of playing the monster (he did so three times), and so, in The House of Frankenstein, he passed on his most famous role to a stunt man named Glenn Strange. Unlike Karloff, Strange was never on the right corner at the right time. He had once been chosen to play Tarzan, but then he was pushed aside by Johnny Weissmuller. Now that he was assigned to imitate Karloff, Jack Pierce again did the makeup, and Pierce could probably have made even Gary Cooper look like the Frankenstein monster. Strange would reenact the role in House of Dracula (1945) and in the ultimate degradation, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948). But Strange’s last major decision was to reject the role of the legendary gillman in The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and he worked out his last years as Sam the bartender in the television series Gunsmoke.
The Hays Office objected to the heroine’s description of the evening on which she got pregnant, “ . . . and then kinda . . . out to a roadhouse somewhere and then you know . . . like that. . . .” It also asked that “all the material set forth on pages 33, 34, 35, 36, and 37, having to do with the pregnancy of the girl, be drastically cut down and the matter entirely rewritten.” For good measure, it asked that a clergyman named Upperman be renamed, “because the name has a comedy flavor which is not good when used in connection with a clergyman.”
In such circumstances, it was hard to see how Preston Sturges could ever get Hays Office approval for his comedy about a girl named Trudy Kockenlocker, who found herself pregnant with sextuplets by a soldier whose name she could remember only as something like Private Ratskywatsky. Not only was it immoral but it was unpatriotic, and this in 1944, when American troops were fighting their way across northern France. The studio bosses at Paramount had let Sturges make the movie, but they anticipated nothing but trouble. They delayed for more than a year in releasing it at all. But Sturges had a way of getting what he wanted, and of making even the most grievous situations funny. Not cruelly funny—anybody could do that—but charmingly funny.
The premiere of The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek was, of course, a triumph. James Agee, writing in Time, said Sturges’s new film was “a little like talking to a nun on a roller coaster.” Writing in The Nation (Agee was a regular reviewer for both magazines), he said that “the Hays Office has either been hypnotized into a liberality for which it should be thanked, or has been raped in its sleep.” The New York Times was equally pleased: “A more audacious picture—a more delightfully irreverent one—than this new lot of nonsense at the Paramount has never come slithering madly down the path.” And lines began forming outside the theater. The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, immoral and unpatriotic as it was, became the biggest commercial hit of 1944, taking in what was then an impressive sum of nine million dollars.
That was the way things generally happened in Preston Sturges movies. The impossible triumphed; the powerful were made ridiculous; penniless idealists became millionaires. This kind of upheaval may have seemed merely the product of a fertile imagination—and Sturges’s imagination was certainly that—but much of Sturges’s life was a Sturges comedy. His real name was Edmund Preston Biden, that being the name of his father, who worked for a Chicago collection agency and played the banjo and drank too much. His mother, Mary Dempsey Biden, who loathed the banjo, was a woman of considerable charm and considerable imagination. “Anything she said three times she believed fervently,” Sturges recalled. “Often twice was enough.”
When her son was two, she fled Chicago and took the boy to Europe, where she became a great friend of Isadora Duncan. (It was she who eventually painted the red Chinese shawl that Miss Duncan managed to get caught in the wheel of her Bugatti, and so choked to death.) She also convinced herself that her real name was not Dempsey but Desmond, and then D’Este, and thus she became, in her own mind, an Italian princess. Her mother persuaded the princess to return to Chicago, with her son Preston, the prince, and there she married a quiet stockbroker named Solomon Sturges. Two years later, though, she was off to Europe again, to the Bayreuth of Wagner, where she shared a villa with Isadora Duncan.
Her next husband was a Turk named Vely Bey, whose father had been a physician to the sultan. One day when Mary suffered a rash on her face, her new father-in-law concocted a purple lotion that soon cured it. Mary saw vast possibilities. She thought of a splendid name for her discovery, Le Secret du Harem, and she opened the Maison d’Este on the Rue de la Paix. The real D’Este family threatened a lawsuit to stop this absurd usurpation of a famous name, so Mary changed the name of her store to Maison Desti. She put her son Preston, by now fifteen, in charge of operating a new outlet on the plage at Deauville.
None of this is of surpassing significance, except that, like the childhood images that keep reappearing in the films of Federico Fellini—the fat woman on the beach or the unattainable angel—such situations of cheerful implausibility came to animate all of Sturges’s comedies, and these were among the best and funniest comedies of the early 1940’s. After the most haphazard of educations, Sturges joined the Army Air Corps and acquired a passion for flying, but the war ended before he ever got to France. His mother, tired of running the Maison Desti in New York, handed it all over to her son, and he found that he enjoyed inventing new lipsticks and makeups.
He met a girl of twenty, named Estelle Godfrey, who, primarily to escape a mother addicted to drugs, had married a man of sixty-four. Within a few months, she abandoned her husband and married Sturges, bringing with her a trust-fund income of eleven thousand dollars a year. The Sturgeses bought a house in the country, and Preston spent his time inventing things—a new kind of automobile with the engine in the rear, a new photoengraving process, a flying machine that was a hybrid of airplane and helicopter. After four years of this, Estelle suddenly announced to Sturges that she no longer loved him.
Sturges was devastated, contemplated suicide, then tried writing songs—“Oh, Minnie” and “Asia Minor Blues” and “Maybe You’ll Be My Baby.” Nobody wanted to publish them, so he wrote a play, The Guinea Pig, and when nobody wanted to produce it, he produced it himself. It was a moderate success, enough to interest Broadway producers in his next venture. He wrote Strictly Dishonorable in nine days, and it soon became, implausibly but inevitably, the smash hit of 1929. His first week’s royalty check was fifteen hundred dollars.
On a train to Palm Beach, he met Eleanor Post Hutton, the stepdaughter of Edward F. Hutton, the Wall Street millionaire, and the granddaughter of C. W. Post, the Battle Creek cereal millionaire. She was tw
enty, and charming; they charmed each other. Arriving in Palm Beach, Sturges went to stay at her family palace. He announced to her father that he wanted to marry her.
“You can’t afford to marry a girl like Eleanor,” said E. F. Hutton.
“Why not?” said Sturges. “I’ve got a hit play and an income of fifteen hundred a week.”
“For her that’s pin money,” said E. F. Hutton.
The same kind of dialogue was taking place between Eleanor and her mother. “He even owns a yacht,” said Eleanor.
“How large?” asked Marjorie Post Hutton.
“Fifty-two feet,” said Eleanor.
“My dear, you mean a yawl,” said Marjorie Post Hutton.
The headline on the front page of the New York Times a month later said: ELEANOR HUTTON ELOPES WITH PLAYWRIGHT; WEDS PRESTON STURGES OVER PARENTS’ PROTEST.
It didn’t last, of course. Nothing in Sturges’s life lasted; that was the essence of Sturges’s comedies. Everything was breakable. And there could be no preposterous triumphs until there had been preposterous failures (and vice versa). Sturges was somehow persuaded by a French musician named Maurice Jacquet to rewrite the libretto for a Jacquet operetta named Silver Swan, which had already flopped. Sturges not only wasted his time writing a new libretto, he also wasted $64,000 of Eleanor’s inheritance to produce it himself. Eleanor loved Sturges, but she was used to being taken care of, not to doing the cooking. She decided she would go to Paris.
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