A Pair of Frankensteins

Tonight I watched Frankenstein (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935), back-to-back on Turner Classic Movies. I've seen both many times before and I'm still uncertain which is the greater film. Certainly Bride is the very rare sequel which is as good as or better than its original. Frankenstein is more of a pure horror film -- chilling, eerie, deeply unnerving, and it moves like an arrow going unerringly from beginning to end with virtually no pauses. Karloff was never scarier as the monster than in this 1931 film. It's spare and always right on target. Just think of the monster's first appearance in the doorway, turning around to face the camera as it cuts closer and closer to that inhuman face.

By contrast, Bride is a wonderful cornucopia of macabre black humor, satire, a decidedly queer subtext, more lavish production values, and digressions into all sorts of fascinating avenues for the monster to develop as a human being.  (And yes, it's hard to watch the scene with the monster and the blind hermit without thinking of Gene Hackman's hilarious turn as the hermit in Young Frankenstein). That makes it sound like I prefer it to the original, but I really can't make up my mind, and I'm sure that people will be arguing about the merits of both films in comparison to each other for many years to come. 

Suffice to say that I greatly enjoyed watching them one after the other. They seem like one unified movie, impeccably directed by James Whale with Karloff, Colin Clive, Ernest Thesinger, and marvelous character actors. Rather than argue which one is better than the other, I recommend everyone watch both films back to back the way I did tonight. The result is enormously satisfying, even if continuity is slightly strained by Henry Frankenstein's fiance played by a different actress, Valerie Hobson instead of Mae Clarke, in Bride, with different colored hair -- well, one can't be too picky about these matters.  Better to focus on a world of Gods and Monsters, and what the implications of that might be.  (NB: Has any actor ever used their few minutes on the screen more effectively than Elsa Lanchester in Bride? Admittedly, she plays two parts, both the bride and author Mary Shelley.)

In short, two masterpieces -- I almost said monsterpieces  -- of horror (or terror, the term Karloff preferred), as thrilling today as they were nearly a century ago.  "We belong dead," the monster says about Dr. Pretorius, the bride and himself at the end of Bride of Frankenstein.  But thanks to devoted fans all over the world, they live!

The Phantom of the Opera (1925)

The Phantom of the Opera (1925).  I saw it again recently with the color sequence in the picture above. I was surprised to find the pace extremely brisk this time -- it didn't drag at all.  The Phantom appears early on and is present for most of the film, giving the audience a lot of Chaney's great performance. I particularly noticed the influence of German Expressionism in the lighting, photography and sets of the underground lake and lair of the phantom. After the initial shock of seeing his face, I didn't feel frightened by The Phantom but rather felt enormous pity for him this time around. He's obviously quite mad with loneliness and frustration and the burden of his hideous appearance. He's still the best Phantom of them all.

Monster Kid

I guess I really was a "monster kid."  I never liked to think of myself as one, just as trekkies dislike being referred to by that term. But I have to cop to the facts. As a lad I watched as many horror films as I could on New York's premiere horror shows, "Creature Features" and "Chiller Theater."  I bought my copy of "Famous Monsters of Filmland" every month along with the somewhat more sophisticated magazine "Castle of Frankenstein." I even had my photo included on the fan page of FM. I read the horror fiction of Mary Shelley, Bram Soker, Poe, H.P. Lovecraft and Robert Bloch. I read horror fanzines: the excellent "Gore Creatures" as well as the slick-paper "Photon" and "Cinemafantastique."  I bought every issue of the horror newspaper "The Monster Times" and purchased reprint volumes of the great EC horror comics of the 1950s. I lovingly assembled and painted the Aurora monster models and owned the complete "Phantom of the Opera" (1925) on Super 8 film. I also shot my own horror films with a Super 8 camera. I dutifully went to all the new horror films, no matter how dreadful some of them were, such as Al Adamson's "Dracula vs. Frankenstein" (1971), because Forrest J. Ackerman had a cameo in it, the names Dracula and Frankenstein were in the title, and it included performances by Lon Chaney, Jr. and J. Carol Nash.  (It also introduced the now justly forgotten "Zandor Vorkov" as Count Dracula.)  I went to the science fiction and comic book conventions in Manhattan and published a fanzine of my own. (One issue!) I wrote horror stories and had one published in the fan pages of James Warren's comic magazine Creepy. Dracula and King Kong posters adorned my bedroom wall.  Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Vincent Price and Lon Chaney Sr. and Jr. were gods to me. Eventually I went on to other things, but here I am, back again. I'm still a monster kid at heart and always will be.

Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)

In honor of Halloween, I watched this great comedy horror film again Saturday night on Svengoolie for what must be the 50th time, or something like that. I still marvel at how seamlessly the comedy and horror blend together into a perfect whole. Ironically, the introduction of Abbott and Costello infused new blood (no pun intended) into the franchise. And the "appearance" of Vincent Price's voice as the Invisible Man at the very end was the cherry on top of this very rich ice cream sundae. Plus the film gives you lots of Bela for your buck.  Not to mention that Walter Lantz of Woody Woodpecker fame did the animation sequences.  Kudos also to Lon Chaney, Jr., Glenn Strange, Lenore Aubert, the wonderful Frank Ferguson, and Bud and Lou, for a grand entertainment indeed.  As critic Leonard Maltin said, the movie works because "the monsters play it straight."  Just as performances of the Greek tragedies would be followed by a comedy, so the Frankenstein/ Dracula / Wolf Man series comes to an end with a laugh.

Dracula (1931)

Last night I watched Bela Lugosi and company in the 1931 Dracula for the first time in many years. I've seen clips from the film since then, but this was the first time I viewed it from beginning to end in a long while.  I was immediately drawn into the brilliantly eerie atmosphere. With all its flaws, and it does have some, it's still a masterpiece. Yet I continue to feel the movie ends a bit abruptly.  Indeed the subplot with Lucy, which was included in the script, was partially deleted from the film. You get a little bit of it and then the movie drops it. I think that was a mistake.  

I also paid close attention to the famous piece of torn cardboard leaning against the lamp in both Lucy and Mina's bedroom.  Apparently nurses would use the cardboard to shield the light from their patients who were sleeping in the bed next to them while the nurse read a book. Yet that doesn't explain why the cardboard shows up in Lucy's bedroom next to the lamp before she even needs a nurse. There's no explanation for it in the film, and anyone looking at it on a big screen has to wonder what that ugly piece of cardboard is doing there in both scenes. I've read that one shot from the earlier scene was taken and used for the later scene. And the famous Spanish version of Dracula (1931), the furniture is arranged differently and there's no cardboard light diffuser at all.

Nevertheless, Lugosi continues to compel, and the film offers many chilling delights to this day. I think I may have underrated Helen Chandler's performance in the past. She's very good when she's possessed by Dracula. Her eyes are mesmerizing.  

Another thing that Rhodes points out is that a close examination of the English and Spanish Draculas reveals the Tod Browning moved his camera more often than people recall.  His camera was not as static as is often believed.  

One final note. When the couple ask Van Helsing if he will be coming with them, he says "not right now, presently." Apparently Universal was going to have him speak to the audience at the end much the way he does at the beginning of Frankenstein. But the scene was never included in the film and it leaves a mystery in the mind of some viewers.  

But all nitpicking aside, this is a landmark horror film that can be watched with pleasure again and again.  I just wish it was a bit longer.  Which may be yet another indication of a great film.

Emily Dickinson Bog

It's been a long time since I posted here. The pandemic and the loss of some close relatives put me into a funk, one might even say dropped me into a bog, and I stopped writing for a while. So what better way to celebrate my modest return than this apropos poem by Emily Dickinson.

I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one's name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!

 

Holiday movies

The Miracle of the Bells (1948)

2020 was certainly a year that needed a miracle.  Coronavirus pretty much brought the world to a halt, and there was probably more movie watching at home than any other year in history.  So perhaps appropriate to end this blogs entry for the year with two Christmas-themed films.  First up: Fred MacMurray, Alida Valli and Frank Sinatra in The Miracle of the Bells. 

I happened to see the ending of this film when I was a kid and was so struck by its somber emotionality that I've always been curious about the rest of the story.   (Like Laura, the male character spent much of the film talking about a beautiful young woman who's dead,  only unlike that 1943 film noir classic, the woman here really is dead.) This year I finally succumbed and watched the entire movie. It's a perfect example of post-war piety + Hollywood hucksterism. And the perfect man to pull it off was Ben Hecht, basing his screenplay on a best-selling novel but obviously infused it with his unique blend of cynicism, sentimentality, and the dash of mysticism he affected in his middle years.  A critic like Pauline Kael would undoubtedly dismiss it all as Hollywood hokum, the perfect blend of kitsch and Catholicism, but I found it curiously affecting.  It doesn't hurt that the actors are all in fine form: Fred MacMurray playing a similar character as the one in Double Indemnity, only this time he's a nice guy (but still saying "That's right, baby" every 5 minutes); Lee J Cobb, on the nose as the movie producer (and one year away from his career-defining role in Death of a Salesman), Alida Valli, less bloodless than she is in other films (and herself a year away from her greatest film, The Third Man); plus a surprisingly low-key, thoughtful performance by Frank Sinatra as the gentle priest. 

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One can't really it a very good film, but it catches you up in its movieland mysticism -- even Hecht's hard-bitten newspaper reporters get bitten by belief in the "miracle."  (Hollywood's idea of a miracle is an actress who dies before her first movie -- about Joan of Arc, what else? -- premieres but, with the help of press agent McMurray and perhaps the Almighty, becomes a hit so that it can pay for a hospital in her coal-mining hometown which will treat others who get the disease she dies from.)  Maybe I have a soft spot for this film because my own mother, like Valli's character in the film, was a pretty Polish Catholic girl of 20 in 1948. Call this film a very guilty pleasure, but it's not a sin to enjoy it. 

The Bishop's Wife (1947)

And speaking of guilty pleasures, I also saw The Bishop's Wife, which was better than I thought it would be. Since Cary Grant is one of my two all-time favorite film actors the other being Humphrey Bogart), it's surprising I've never seen this film before. But not so surprising when you consider that Cary plays an angel in this film, and I've always been somewhat adverse to angels in movies. So I put off watching this for many years. Once again, I'm glad I finally gave in. Young is more low-key and in control than she was in The Stranger, and Grant is in top form. True, it's more post-war Hollywood piety, but the script by Robert E. Sherwood is intelligent and the cinematography by Gregg Toland is of course superb (there are some very fancy rooms for him to photograph and show off his technique).  David Niven has the thankless task of playing The Bishop's Wife"s husband.  Cary was originally set to play the role of the bishop husband, but after reading the script astutely realized that angel was a far better role and was able to use his box-office clout to grab it for himself). A good Christmas film for those who are tired of watching another version of A Chrisotmas Carol or It's a Wonderful Life for the 30th time.

I should note that the ubiquitous Ben Hecht also had a role, albeit uncredited, in the writing of this screenplay. In 1939 he published a volume of novellas titled A Book of Miracles, and it seems in retrospect to have been the beginning of a stage of spiritual interests for Hecht which ultimately led to his valiant efforts, through writing pageants and full page ads in newspapers, to save European Jews during the Holocaust, as well as his later work helping to help create the state of Israel. But for now, his miracles existed mainly on celluloid.

I do hope you appreciate how assiduously I avoid spoilers in my brief commentaries. I barely even mentioned the plot. (It has much to-do about Episcopal Bishop David Niven trying to raise funds to build a cathedral but running into problems with finicky patrons along with his deteriorating marriage.)  As for Cary Grant -- what an angel!

Sweet Bird of Youth (1962)

Birds can fly. But they also fly away.  So does youth.

After watching the pseudo-piety and celluloid of the previous two films, it's good to get down and dirty, Tennessee Williams style.  This 1962 adaptation of the 1959 Williams play features superb performances by Paul Newman, Rip Torn, Geraldine Page, and the beautiful young Shirley Knight. Newman, Page, and Torn -- which sounds like the name of a disreputable law firm -- were also in the Broadway production which ran over a year.) Ed Begley Sr. as the corrupt small town mayor, dominates every scene he's in, which garnered him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his work in this film.  A thoroughly satisfying film experience, and one of the best adaptations on film of Tennessee Williams I've ever seen.  Oh, I forgot to mention that Newman plays a Chance Wayne, a gigolo servicing an aging movie star played by Geraldine Page, who indulges in plenty of sex mixed with alcohol and hashish, whichsomehow got by the Motion Picture Production Code, which was obviously on its last legs in 1962.  Newman is using Page to get a screen test in Hollywood, while she's using him to distract herself from her fear of growing too old to maintain her status as a movie star.  Newman has brought her to the small Gulf Coast Town he grew up in, apparently in order to win the heart of the mayor's beautiful daughter, splendidly played by Shirley Knight, whom he has been in love with for years but unable to marry because of his lack of money and generally low status. Rip Torn, playing the mayor's son and enforcer, is the enforcer, is as crafty and mean as Martin Landau in North by Northwest.

Afterwards I read Bosley Crothers' review published in New York Times when the film was first released. As I expected, he absolutely loathed it. Crothers was a rather moralistic critic and he could not fail to be disgusted by the characters in this film, all of whom are deeply flawed, to put it mildly. Naturally he finds  aesthetic reasons to justify his visceral objection to the film -- you know he's appalled by the drug use, casual sex, and overall atmosphere of dissipation.  Crowther can't imagine that a gigolo as manipulative and vile as Newman could possibly be sentimental enough to still carry the torch for  his early love, the Shirley Knight character named Heavenly.  Chance and Heavenly: sometimes Tennessee Williams could be a bit obvious. But Williams believed that even his lowest characters were worthy of  redemption, and in other films Newman often found redemption with the help of a loving woman, as in The Hustler.  Which gives even this film a spiritual patina of sorts.  (Wasn't it Oscar Wilde who said "every saint has a past and every sinner has a future"?). Crowther also found some of the plot contrived, which is perhaps a valid point, since Williams in fact combined two of his one-act plays to make this full length one, and the melding required some contrivances, to be sure.

I read the play years ago and didn't care for it that much at the time, and I'm a bit ashamed to admit that I like the movie because it's been Hollywoodized to some extent.  (Meaning it's taken some of the rough edges off  Williams' play.)  One reason I probably couldn't appreciate it as a teenager is that it's hard at that age to fully understand the desperation of people who are getting older and feeling that the best of life is behind them. Teens don't tend to relate to that.  But the movie is much more exhilarating than I remember the play being.  I think director Brooks amplified some of the political hoopla which is always fun, especially when it's southern and pious and utterly phony. 

And here at last comes a spoiler alert: Richard Brooks, who wrote the screenplay of the film as well as directed it, gives it a happier ending than the original play had. Normally I'm a sucker for an unhappy ending. But at the end of this deeply unhappy year,  unhappy for me and even more so for so much of the world,  I was grateful that this nearly 60-year-old film provided me with a little happiness, however implausible it might have been.