Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Raven,’ As Poe’s Creature Offers an Unexpected Answer)

Dr. Craven [played by Vincent Price, center] [to The Raven]: “Who sent you to me?”

[The Raven stares at him silently]

Dr. Craven: “Are you some dark-winged messenger from beyond?”

[Still no answer]

Dr. Craven:” Answer me, monster, tell me truly!”

[sadly]

Dr. Craven: “Shall I ever hold again that radiant maiden whom the angels call Lenore?”

Dr. Bedloe [played by Peter Lorre, left] [as The Raven] “How the hell should I know? What am I, a fortune teller?”—The Raven (1963), screenplay by Richard Matheson, very, very loosely suggested by the Edgar Allan Poe poem, directed by Roger Corman

As soon as I heard this exchange, I burst out laughing, at the sheer surprise over Edgar Allan Poe being sent up. That line from The Raven was ad libbed by Peter Lorre during production of the film.

The actor’s penchant for improvisation deeply annoyed co-star Boris Karloff (right). In a post-film question-and-answer session at the Barrymore Film Center in Fort Lee, NJ last week, Sara Karloff and Victoria Price, daughters of the two horror icons, related this and other anecdotes about their fathers, holding forth in as entertaining a fashion as what the audience had just witnessed on screen.

Accustomed to English theatrical tradition of learning his lines cold, Karloff was constantly made uncomfortable by Lorre, who was more used to improvisation from his time with continental European troupes. It fell to Vincent Price, who had trained in both styles in London and American stages, to become the go-between for his two co-stars. (This was the fifth and last film together for Price and Lorre, who died a year after its release.)

Among the other anecdotes shared by Ms. Karloff and Ms. Price:

*Karloff, still under contract for a couple of days for producer-director Roger Corman, found himself acting in a hastily created film for rookie director Peter Bogdanovich, Targets.

*Jack Nicholson, in one of his earliest roles, did not turn in one of the more impressive performances of his career.

*The beautiful cinematography for the movie was created by Floyd Crosby, father of rock ‘n’ roller David Crosby.

*Karloff made 80 films after coming to Hollywood in the silent era, but people forgot all of them until his 81st, Frankenstein, he told his daughter.

*Price came to London in the mid-Thirties to study art history, but he enjoyed the theater so much that he eventually tried out for a play, and began his acting career there. Nevertheless, Ms. Price observed, he never lost his love for art--not only being an avid collector himself and serving on the board of museums, but even staying at cheaper hotels and buying lower-price tickets to spend on paintings.

*Price credited his first notable horror success, House of Wax (1953), for keeping his name before the public, at a time when Hollywood had "graylisted" him for past political activity--i.e., not subjecting him to the full ban that blacklisting represented, but ensuring he would only get lesser roles.

Quote of the Day (Ian Frazier, on Why Mummies Are Better Workers Than Zombies)

 “I often remind personnel directors at competitive companies that mummies work eighty per cent cheaper than zombies. Mummies are also slightly more articulate, and they are easier to deal with if they become enraged. If a mummy starts to chase you, merely pull on a loose end of one of his bandages and spin him like a top, unwinding him until he collapses in a pile of bones. Unlike zombies, ninety-seven per cent of mummies are not unionized, and some have even been known to threaten union organizers with bloody butcher knives.” —Ian Frazier, “Why Mummies?”, The New Yorker, Feb. 27, 2017

The image accompanying this post shows Boris Karloff in The Mummy (1932).

This Day in Film History (‘Frankenstein’ Scares Up Great Box Office)

Dec. 4, 1931—Universal Studios consolidated its growing fame as a creator and marketer of a new film genre with Frankenstein. Though its grand opening had taken place in Santa Barbara, Calif., in late November, its New York premiere on this date presaged an enthusiastic embrace of its hideous monster by a public living through a different kind of horror: the Great Depression. More than 76,000 watched the show at the Mayfair Theatre that first week before it opened to wider release.

Most interesting to the studio, of course, was the film’s profit margin. Universal couldn’t compete with major studios such as MGM in lavish spectacle, but it hoped to keep going with movies produced cheaply but distinctively. Frankenstein represented the triumph of that strategy: made for only $250,000, the film returned $12 million upon its release.

Frankenstein took even more liberties with its source material than the Universal release that opened up the talking-picture horror film in earnest earlier that year, Dracula. Unlike the monster in the 1818 novel by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the unloved creature onscreen compounded his ugliness with a pathetic inability to communicate, a virtually nonstop series of grunts and growls.

That vision of the character did not please the actor who had just achieved a career-making triumph with Dracula and who now stood to play another fearsome creature: Bela Lugosi. The former European matinee idol appeared in a 20-minute test reel for the part while still on the set of Dracula, but he was not happy about playing a non-talking role, complaining that he did not come to America to “play a scarecrow.” 

He much preferred the real Frankenstein—not the product of reanimated life, but the obsessed (and verbose) scientist who created him. It didn’t help that his proposed makeup design for the monster was rejected by Universal.

Universal, then, decided to look elsewhere for an actor to play the monster. It didn’t have to look far—a 44-year-old Briton spotted in the studio commissary by director James Whale, and offered a screen test on the spot. 

The actor, Boris Karloff, already in Hollywood for a decade, with roughly 80 films to his credit, still hadn’t made his mark with the wider public, so he jumped at the role. It only made his career, so much so that he called his character “My Dear Friend.”

That’s not to say, though, that it was easy to play. To start with, there were heavy boots (13 pounds each) he had to clomp around in, attached to steel struts that gave the movie monster his distinct lurch (as opposed to Shelley’s creature, whose frightening speed allows him to effortlessly elude captors). His dark, poorly-fitting suit was a nightmare to wear in the August heat. 

And Whale demanded take after take of Karloff lugging Colin Clive’s Dr. Henry Frankenstein up the hill toward the windmill for the movie’s climax, leaving Karloff with back problems so severe for the rest of his life that he would require three major operations.

Above all, there was all that make-up—3½ hours to put on, an equivalent time to take off.  The makeup Lugosi wanted for the role—a mass of dark hair, clay-like skin—would have been simpler to endure by comparison. 

Most of what is seen onscreen—the template for the popular image for the monster since then—came from Jack P. Pierce, the Universal makeup whiz who later came up with similarly indelible designs for the title characters in The Mummy and The Wolf Man. Even before working on Karloff, Pierce researched anatomy, surgery, medicine, criminal history, criminology, burial customs and electrodynamics. 

From that point on, he used grayish-green greasepaint on the skin, contrasting with the gray tones of the normal characters; electrodes protruding from the neck; and for the forehead, cotton and collodion (a foul-smelling liquid plastic). (See this post from nine years ago from the blog "Frankensteinia" on the marvels this makeup magician came up with.)

While often insistent on getting his way, Pierce accepted two suggestions by Karloff. First, the actor took out his dental bridge, giving one cheek a sunken look; second, upon Karloff’s remark that wide-open eyes created a stronger (erroneous) suggestion of human life, Pierce crafted droopy eyelids to underscore the impression of reanimated flesh. 

The second innovation made all the more remarkable Karloff’s performance, as he had to suggest the monster’s alternating pathos and malevolence without wide-open eyes that could express his feelings.

But the movie’s impact may have owed as much to its scenic and sound design as its extraordinary makeup. Frankenstein could only have been made several years into the talkie era, when Hollywood not only had enough time to absorb the style of German Expressionist films but also to experiment with sound.

The shadows and unusual angularity characteristic of directors Robert Wiene (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) and F.W. Murnau (Nosferatu) figure prominently in Frankenstein’s graveyard and castle scenes—environments that became commonplace in later horror cinema. These scenes also form a huge part of the movie's vertical orientation, climaxed by the monster reaching for the sun.

To heighten the ghoulish proceedings, a microphone in the coffin amplified the sound of the grave dirt hitting the lid; the “Castle Thunder” sound effect was used here for the first time; and the reanimated monster was introduced in full earnest to the audience when they could hear his heavy footsteps but not see his body.

Quote of the Day (Mary Shelley, on the Shock of ‘Sudden Change’)

"Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change."―Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)

I just thought I’d get you in the mood for Halloween with this quote from the novel Frankenstein and this image from the classic 1931 film—with Boris Karloff, of course, as the monster who makes a “great and sudden change” and brings terror to his creator.

Also on my mind these days, chiefly because I’ve finally gotten around to reading it, seven years after publication: The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein, by the astonishingly prolific British man of letters Peter Ackroyd.

Appreciations: Boris Karloff’s ‘Thriller’

I have been meaning to write this post for the last several months. Today—the 45^th anniversary of the death of Boris Karloff—provides the occasion to meditate on one of the most interesting old series I’ve come across, either on cable TV or DVD, in recent years—one that prominently featured the star of Frankenstein, The Mummy and other classics.

Say the title “Thriller” and Gen-Xers and younger are likely to think of the 1983 pathbreaking Michael Jackson music video, featuring horror-film veteran Vincent Price. But TV viewers of a certain age are more likely to recall a series hosted by another horror icon—Karloff, who, with Bela Lugosi, helped make Universal Studios a fortune several times over.

Movie fans know all about these latter movies: They’ve aired constantly on television (and have established themselves equally strongly in the DNA of the horror-flick fan by being studied intensely in film schools by budding auteurs who go on to pay homage—i.e., steal the best ideas—for their own movies).

But they are less likely to be familiar with this series. It lasted only from September 1960 through the summer of 1962, and the 67 episodes in these two seasons did not make it ideal for syndication, where 100 shows were usually viewed as the minimum required. I was a mere toddler in the show’s original run, and I only recall seeing one episode from the series—“Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper”—nearly 30 years ago. Believe me, the show was gone from my market in no time.

Which brings me to Memorable Television, or MeTV. It’s a trip into vintage television, both old favorites (Perry Mason) and shows not seen anywhere on the dial since maybe the first time it aired, such as Rod Serling’s follow-up to The Twilight Zone, Night Gallery. To my astonishment, over the last several months on Sunday night, I’ve taken to following Thriller—or, as I’ve come to think of it, “Boris Karloff’s Thriller.”

Karloff started the series when his career was in its home stretch.  At age 73, suffering from considerable back pains (incurred while filming Frankenstein nearly 30 years before), the days when he could appear a terrifying menace simply through his physical presence were over. Yet, with his films being shown constantly on television, he remained a familiar name—what we might call a “brand” today—to millions of viewers.

The show that Karloff was invited to host was an anthology series, a writer-dominated outgrowth of radio theater, with episodes linked not by common characters or actors so much as a common mood or, even more important, a common host. At first an occasional waystation for aging screen idols transitioning out of lead roles (e.g., Robert Montgomery, Loretta Young), the format soon featured hosts who developed their own personas. John Newland would calmly assure viewers of One Step Beyond that the tales of the uncanny they were about to watch all really happened; Alfred Hitchcock displayed a taste for the macabre as marked as his rotund frame seen in silhouette; and Rod Serling invited viewers, in a sonorous voice that managed only barely to check the chaos about to be unleashed, to step into “a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man… between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge… an area which we call The Twilight Zone.”

The presence of Karloff may have been even more essential than these other hosts in holding the series together, for at its inception Thriller had not yet found its sea legs. The title itself reflected this ambiguity. Did the title refer to crime—TV’s low-budget answer to film noir—or horror and the supernatural? After one of the early episodes, “The Twisted Image,” brought down cries of sensationalism for depicting a serial killer kidnapping a child, the show, at the insistence of CBS, had a different producer focused on each genre.

Had I come in on the series during its MeTV run on one of these crime melodramas, I might have given up at how inferior they were to the show’s inspiration and competitor, Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Luckily, I watched one of the better hours in the show’s run, “The Terror in Teakwood,” about a concert pianist who desecrates the grave of an archrival, and I was hooked.

CBS programmers quickly noticed that the crime episodes were neither well done nor well received. The horror episodes, on the other hand, were usually written by (or based on works by) some of the finest short-story practitioners of the genre (many contributors to the fantasy and horror fiction pulp magazine Weird Tales), including Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson and August Derleth.

At the beginning of the show’s run, Karloff stated that he was glad that the show’s title was broad enough to accommodate either the crime or horror genre, and that it was better to entertain the audience than to shock it with violence. Nevertheless, when programmer preferences shifted the show, at least somewhat, toward horror, he was ideally positioned as a link to an earlier age of classic horror.

Karloff appeared in five of the nearly 70 episodes as an actor, and they are among the great fan favorites in the series, in much the same way that Hitchcock-directed episodes of his own show are among the most prized. He continued to display his versatility in these—from a fake but genuinely paternal magician to a crazed scientist intent on resurrecting the dead (a nod to the Frankenstein films that had made his reputation).

But even his eerie introductions came to be prized by fans. After a short scene that hinted at what was to come, he would suddenly appear, usually with a prop--a candle in hand, a skeleton in the background--slightly arching his heavy eyebrows. With a gentle but decidedly wintry smile, he would introduce the actors for the night’s entertainment, then announce, in sepulchral tones with a slight hint of a lisp: “As sure as my name is Boris Karloff, this is a Thriller!” Altogether he looked, in the words of Lucy Chase Williams, author of The Complete Films of Vincent Price, like “a sinister Father Christmas.”

At its best, in the last 50 episodes or so, Thriller became, according to Stephen King’s Danse Macabre, “probably the best horror series ever put on TV.” For anyone interested in the work of particular actors, the series represented an interesting assortment of longtime screen vets (Mary Astor, Henry Daniell), younger actors headed for future fame (Marlo Thomas, Leslie Nielsen, Ursula Andress, Elizabeth Montgomery), and actors who did much fine TV work but never achieved the level of fame that their talents deserved (Patricia Barry, Jeannette Nolan). It also afforded a different creative avenue for longtime actors desiring to branch out into directing, such as Ray Milland and Ida Lupino. (The latter was at the helm for nine episodes, including some deemed the best in the series: “La Strega” and “Trio for Terror.”)

Occasionally, particularly early in the show’s run, an episode might be slightly marred by an ending obviously meant to keep the network censors at bay. But as time went on, the series managed the neat trick for that time of avoiding violence while leaving viewers, at fade-out, with the distinct feeling that—through, say, the successful ministrations of a malevolent ghost (or Karloff’s mad scientist)—the order of the universe had been profoundly shaken. It lived up to what Karloff expressed about the films he made prior to the series:

“Horror means something revolting. Anybody can show you a pailful of innards. But the object of the roles I played is not to turn your stomach - but merely to make your hair stand on end.”

The 14-disc DVD set of Thriller is a must for TV and film aficionados. The shows can be appreciated for being the apprentice work of stars and directors (e.g., Arthur Hiller) who went on to bigger and better things, for the eerie, jazzy score by Jerry Goldsmith--or simply, as its host would surely prefer, a short, hit-or-miss, but often glorious attempt to provide gore-free but chill-drenched gothic horror.