Astro Boy Meets Frankenstein

Osamu Tezuka (1928-1989) was like Walt Disney and Jack Kirby rolled into one. His vast talent, imagination and incredibly prolific output earned him the title “god of manga” in his native Japan. His influence endures. The current popularity of manga and anime worldwide has its roots in Tezuka’s work.

One of the most precious memories of my life is of spending two days with Tezuka when he visited Montreal in the late 80s. I was invited to dine with him at the Japanese embassy, an unforgettable experience. When I left, late that evening, Tezuka said he had to work a couple of hours before turning in. He had to rough out ten pages of comics and fax them to his studio in Japan. Two hours… Ten pages.

He must have found time to read, as well. I had left him a big pile of books about comics made in Quebec, and the next morning, when we met for lunch, he knew everything about me and my work. We spoke through an interpreter, and I suppose he must have asked her to translate some of the stuff I gave him, but I suspect he figured out a lot of the info by himself. When I introduced him to fellow cartoonists, he’d take the books out, open them, and point to their drawings. I cannot imagine how he did that. I wonder how much sleep he got in over the 12 hours between our two meetings. I think he impressed everyone he ever met with his enthusiasm and his energy.

Dr. Tezuka’s atomic-powered robot Pinocchio, Tetsuwan Atomu, is known in the English speaking world as Astro Boy. Here’s an entire episode from the 80s animated series where Astro Boy confronts a giant Frankenstein robot with bolts sticking out of its neck, ears, chin and hips. 

Go ahead, blow twenty minutes and watch a cartoon: Astro Boy Episode: Frankenstein.

Hideous Progeny

The premise: Dr. Frankenstein really existed and, in the late 1700s, he really did discover how to re-animate the dead. His revolutionary techniques have become common medical knowledge.

The question: How did this impact history?

The answer (actually, 18 different ones): Hideous Progeny, an anthology of original horror fiction edited by Brian Willis and published in 1999 by Razorblade Press (Cardiff). The cover illustration is by Chris Nurse.

There’s a wide variety of tones here, from dark humor and political allegory, to gory horror tales. Quality varies, as in any collection, but the whole makes for a strong book deserving of its British Fantasy Award for Best Anthology, in 2001.

My favorite story, Mad Jack, by Ceri Jordan, deals with the hunt for a sort of reverse Ripper, a rogue resurrectionist who is going around London re-animating dead prostitutes.

You can still find the book on Amazon.co.uk (as I did) at cover price, or less.

The Lake of Frankenstein

On this day, September 28, and on the 29^th, in 1931, director James Whale and his crew, with actors Boris Karloff, Michael Mark, and 7-year old Marilyn Harris, shot the controversial drowning scene at Malibou Lake (not ‘Malibu'), about 30 miles west of Universal studios.

Karloff was uneasy with the scene, but Whale insisted it was necessary. A few weeks later, preview audiences were appalled and the scene was removed. Ironically, the resulting jarring cut, just as The Monster reaches for the little girl, suggests a fate worse than drowning for poor Maria. The scene, thought lost, was found in the late 70s and restored to the film.

The location, a man-made lake, had filled up in 1926 after sitting dry for 3 years. Frankenstein was only the second motion picture to visit there, but the location was soon to become a movie favorite. Films shot there include Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940) and Monsieur Verdoux (1947), the Noir classic The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), and the cult science-fiction I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958).

In the 30’s, The Malibu Club charged $1000 a day “for the use of the lake and adjoining property” and extra for lodging and food. A local newspaper reported that Hollywood money had gotten “the lake and its members out of serious debt. In eight short years the lake reduced its debt from $235,000 to a mere $20,000.”

UPDATE: The Maliboulake.net site reports that Frankenstein’s cinematographer, Arthur Edeson, built himself a home on South Lakeshore overlooking the dam at Malibou Lake in 1926. He may very well be the one who suggested the location for The Monster's only outdoor scene in an otherwise stage-bound film.

The Step of Frankenstein

Part Two of 'Jean-Claude Carrière’s Frankenstein', my contribution to the Luis Bunuel Blog-a-Thon hosted by Flickhead.

Under the Benoit Becker pen name, Jean-Claude Carrière wrote six Frankenstein novels between 1957 and 1959 for the Paris-based Editions Fleuve Noir’s Angoisse (“Dread”) collection. The titles translate as: The Tower of Frankenstein, The Step (or, Footstep) of Frankenstein, The Night of Frankenstein, The Seal of Frankenstein, Frankenstein Prowls, and The Cellar of Frankenstein. The original editions were true pulp paperbacks, bound in cheap cardboard covers, with thick, rough-cut newsprint interiors.

The inspiration for Le pas de Frankenstein is the Orkney Island sequence from the Mary Shelley original. This is where Victor Frankenstein undertook to build a mate for The Monster. At the last moment, just short of galvanizing his new creation to life, Frankenstein reneged and destroyed the female monster, provoking The Monster’s wrath and dooming his own bride, Elizabeth.

Carrière's story takes place 100 years later on Frankenstein’s desolate retreat which he calls, awkwardly, “Cround” Island. This is typical of the somewhat ridiculous, made-up English surnames used throughout the novel, names like Flawtter, Bobsom, Pilljoy, and a village called Plosway, all meant to sound like what an English name should sound like, at least to the ears of a young French writer in 1957.

The villagers of Plosway, on Cround, live hard, isolated lives, at the mercy of sea and superstition. The island’s most unusual inhabitant, incongruously, is a mysterious Caribbean man named Percy. He is believed to practice voodoo and is suspected of grave robbing, no less, but no one dares or bothers to venture out to his remote, decrepit shack.

Into this world arrives Dr. Pilljoy, a mad scientist type looking for the site of Victor Frankenstein’s experiments. He soon zeroes in on Percy’s isolated cabin, confronts the voodoo man, and uncovers the remains of the dismembered bride and Victor Frankenstein’s journal.

Cue The Monster…

Gouroull rises out the sea, having literally walked to the island. The implacable Monster doesn’t breathe, its heart doesn’t beat, and blood doesn’t circulate in its black veins. Guided by distant memory and primitive instinct, the giant makes a beeline for Percy’s cabin. Percy and Dr. Pilljoy hear his step, as if announcing imminent doom, as he approaches.

When Gouroull bursts in, Dr. Pilljoy greets him a la Pretorius and lays out his plan for world domination. Combining the remains left by Frankenstein with “materials” of his own invention, Pilljoy proposes to mold, Golem-like, a new Bride for Gouroull so that they may populate the world with their superior monster offspring and rid the planet of its useless humans. Horrified, Percy makes a break for it, but Gouroull catches up with a leap and a stride, and kills him with his patented neck chomp.

Pilljoy gets down to business. When a handful of villagers work up the courage to investigate the weird goings on, Gouroull goes on a rampage, killing and maiming all who dare approach.

As his work nears completion, Pilljoy sends The Monster out to fetch a young woman from nearby Plosway so that he may perform a full-body blood transfusion to the new Bride and thus bring it to life.

Here, the novel reaches its lurid, Grand Guignol climax. A young widow, Mary Flawtter, her husband having drowned in a fishing accident, is captured and strapped — nude, of course — to a slab next to the fetid, waiting Bride. Just as Pilljoy is about to proceed and drain the helpless woman of every last drop of her blood, something stirs among the piles of baskets left behind by Percy. The voodoo man is exerting revenge from beyond the grave, willing his zombies to life.

Pilljoy and The Monster are tackled by the walking dead. When Gouroull rips a zombie limb from limb, every torn piece of it continues to writhe with supernatural life. Complicating matters, a severed hand lands on the tied-down widow and begins a slow crawl up her nude body to her throat.

All is lost. Pilljoy perishes and the Monster, for all its inhuman strength, is overwhelmed by the hordes of clawing zombies. Roaring in frustration, lightning booming all around, Gouroull escapes, trailing zombie parts, "never to be seen again". Or, at least until the next adventure.

In the end, villagers rescue Mary and the cabin of horrors is consumed in flames. Unbeknownst to the widow, we learn that the most ferocious of the attacking zombies had been her lost husband, risen from the grave to save his forever beloved.

Carrière’s Step of Frankenstein is simple, straightforward pulp horror, with its requisite monsters, bloodbaths, cliffhangers, and naked lady. Characters are barely sketched out, relying on clichés to register with the reader. The plot, in pure pulp tradition, stretches to fill the space between the brief bursts of action parsimoniously peppered throughout the novel. The scene where Pilljoy arrives by boat and disembarks at a pier uses up several pages. Sometimes you wish the writer would just get on with the story, but it must be said that Carrière maintains a palpable feeling of menace throughout the book, the proceedings are steeped in an oppressive atmosphere of doom and gloom, and the payoff is so over the top that readers must have come away wanting to read the next one in the series.

If not for Carrière’s reputation, and the Frankenstein Monster’s brand name, these books would probably be forgotten today and collected solely for their wonderful covers.

The artist, Michel Gourdon, produced the near totality of covers for the Fleuve Noir paperbacks, some 20 different covers per month. In a period covering 1950 to 1978, in addition to his other book cover contracts, advertising and film poster work, Gourdon created a staggering 3500 covers for Fleuve Noir alone.

Today, he is best remembered for his San Antonio series of covers, and his crime and espionage covers that always seemed to feature a prominent topless blonde. It’s nice to know that Gourdon himself is most fond of his old Angoisse horror pulp gouaches.

In 1972, Aredit Pocket Comics adapted Carrière’s Frankensteins in their Hallucinations title (artist not identified), throwing in a seventh issue based on Mary Shelley’s book.

The black and white excerpts I posted here are taken from an overview of the Hallucinations Frankenstein comics on the excellent Beyond The Groovy Age of Horror blog.

See more Gourdon covers here, and here.

The Bunuel Blog-a-Thon continues through the weekend at Flickhead. Click over there for all the links. There's lots of wonderful posts to read.

Jean-Claude Carrière's Frankenstein

There’s a Luis Bunuel Blog-a-Thon underway at Flickhead this week, where you are greeted with a picture of Bunuel dressed as a nun. Right away, you know this is going to be good. I’ll be clicking through all the posts there, I can’t wait.

I had come to think of Bunuel as a filmmaker of the past, but in this new age of political intolerance and re-fanaticized religion, I think Bunuel is as relevant today as he ever was. His work might even be newly required viewing.

My contribution to the Bunuel Thon is, admittedly, borderline. I almost called this post “Luis Bunuel Meets Frankenstein”, but that would be stretching it. Yes, there is a Bunuel/Frankenstein link, albeit a flimsy one. Perhaps, in the spirit of Bunuel himself, I could call it a surrealistic link, in the sense of “irrational juxtaposition”.

Here goes: When he was starting out as a young writer, Luis Bunuel’s close friend and frequent scriptwriting collaborator, Jean-Claude Carrière, penned a series of Frankenstein pulp paperbacks under the house name of Benoit Becker, for the French Fleuve Noir imprint.

A handful of writers used the Becker byline for crime, horror, fantasy and even mildly erotic novels. Readers must have been amazed at Benoit Becker’s range! Carrière’s six Frankensteins, published in 1957-59, were very popular and the original printings with their lugubrious Gourdon covers soon became highly sought collectibles. In 1972, Aredit published digest-sized comic book adaptations of the novels.

Carrière’s Frankenstein series is set roughly a hundred years after the events of Mary Shelley’s book and follows an unstoppable, bloodthirsty Monster as it treks murderously across Europe. Its favored method of mayhem is to rip out a victim’s throat with his bare teeth. Though cover and comic book illustrators depicted the Monster as a typical Karloff flat-skulled type, Carrière describes him as a grey-skinned giant with long black hair and phosphorescent yellow eyes. He has also given the Monster a name, the ominous sounding “Gouroull”, evoking gorillas and ghouls.

Soon after his stint as a horror pulp writer, Carrière met Jacques Tati and began his involvement with films. In 1961, The Anniversary, his co-writing/directing/producing collaboration with Pierre Etaix won them an Oscar for Best Short Film. In 62, Carrière was hired by Luis Bunuel to script The Diary of a Chambermaid. The two men became instant friends and lifetime collaborators.

Look at Carrière’s filmography on IMDB. It’s mind-boggling...

Six films with Bunuel, including Belle de Jour, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and That Obscure Object of Desire. Scripts for Hector Babenco’s At Play in the Fields of the Lord, and Rappeneau’s Cyrano de Bergerac. Collaborations with Godard, Schlondorff, Malle and Wajda. A scriptwriter’s Cesar for The Return of Martin Guerre and an Oscar, with Philip Kaufman, for The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Carrière also wrote commercial blockbusters like Borsalino and Viva Maria, and even a couple of Jess Franco movies, The Diabolical Dr. Z (aka Miss Muerte) and Attack of the Robots, with Eddie Constantine. Goya’s Ghosts, written for Milos Forman, is currently playing in theaters. The two men had previously collaborated on Valmont.

Carrière was also an occasional actor in Bunuel's and other films. One of my favorites is L’alliance (The Wedding Ring), a film about premonition and paranoia that straddles fantasy and the psychological thriller, written by and starring Carrière, opposite Anna Karina. And still, there's more: As a playwright, Carrière worked with Jean-Louis Barrault, Nagisa Oshima and Peter Brooke. He has written songs for Jeanne Moreau and Juliette Greco. As a book writer, he has collaborated with the Dalai Lama. Did I say "mind boggling"?

For all his lofty successes, Carrière never repudiated his Frankenstein novels, good-humoredly calling them “horrors of youth”. In 2003, he participated with other former Fleuve Noir horror writers and cover artist Michel Gourdon in a conference at the Pompidou Center in Paris. Excerpts from the novels were read by Edith Scob, the haunting star of Franju’s Eyes Without a Face. Oh, to have been there!

Carrière often joked with Bunuel about writing the director’s biography. Bunuel would insist that it should be “full of lies”. In the end, as a final collaboration, Carrière ghosted the Bunuel memoir, “My Last Sigh”.

Here’s a wonderful, touching remembrance of Bunuel by Carrière, on Flickhead, and here’s a good interview with Carrière. Jean-Marc Lofficier at Cool French Comics has a page about Carrière’s Frankenstein series.

My follow-up post, a review of Carrière/Becker’s The Step of Frankenstein, is here.

The Covers of Frankenstein : Scott McKowen

Artist Scott McKowen has mostly focused on theater work, earning accolades for his illustrations and designs of posters, programs and brochures for companies all over North America. His ventures into print illustration have met with equal success. In 2003, he was a surprise and welcome choice as cover artist for Marvel Comics’ 1602 mini-series, written by Neil Gaiman, about superheroes as Elizabethan characters.

McKowen’s Frankenstein is part of an outstanding collection of some two dozen covers for the Sterling Publishing Company’s Unabridged Classic Series. A dream assignment if there ever was one. The illustrations are done scratchboard style, evoking old engravings, and finished in muted, intermediary colors.

The artist’s technical mastery is matched only by his impeccable choices of cover subjects. McKowen never shows the obvious, the expected. His covers are not so much illustrative as they are revelatory.

The scenes depicted are often brief moments, mere glimpses into the story that somehow manage to capture the very essence of the book. For example: A cover for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz focuses on Dorothy looking out of a window. In the distance, a cow is tumbling through the air. It’s only when you notice that the window Dorothy stands at is upside down that you understand the whole house is caught up in a tornado, and the adventures has begun.

A cover for Treasure Island has no pirates, no islands, no treasure chest. It shows sails billowing against the sky, and the tiny figure of the boy clinging to the mast. McKowen’s cover for The Secret Garden doesn’t show the garden, it shows a girl opening a door to the garden and looking in. You are pulled in because you want to see what she sees.

Illustrations for Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea invariably include the key scene when Nemo and his guests look out the giant porthole. We usually stand behind them, looking over their shoulders at the sunken marvels beyond. McKowen reverses the scene. We are outside, looking back at the Nautilus’ riveted hull and the men silhouetted at the window. We can only imagine the wonders that they see, which is what the book will tell us. The illustrator’s purpose is not to describe, but to entice.

The Frankenstein cover also eschews the obvious. No laboratories, no lightning storm, no stitched monster. We see Victor Frankenstein — after all he’s the title character — strolling away from us on a path, in the Swiss Alps. He glances back at us in a moment of surprise, just now aware of a presence, as a giant shadow falls upon him.

This is the scene where the Creature meets Victor and demands a mate, but McKowen shows us the instant, heavy with menace, before the confrontation.

You can admire all of Scott McKowen’s Unabridged Classic Series covers on the Sterling Publications site, but I suggest you go to the Barnes & Noble site where the covers pop-up in much larger format. These illustrations deserve to be seen as large as possible. There are other lovely McKowen illustrations on his Rep’s site here and here.

Update:

Preparing an upcoming post, I was reading Samuel Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and I found the following passage that was, obviously, the key to Scott McKowen’s cover:

“Like one, that on a lonely road

Doth walk in fear and dread,


And having once turn'd round, walks on


And turns no more his head:


Because he knows, a frightful fiend


Doth close behind him tread."

Such is the quality of McKowen’s research that he would identify and use as inspiration a passage from a poem that had heavily influenced Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

The Updates of Frankenstein

Updating recent posts with new information…

Broadway Frankenstein

There’s no lack of info — and hype — on the web about Mel Brook’s musical version of Young Frankenstein opening on Broadway this October.

I just thought I’d mention that the show’s website was significantly upgraded this week with new info, cast pictures, video and goodies to download.

Cryptic Cartoons

Demented cartoonist Eric Pigors, whom I profiled earlier, announces that his Cryptic Art book is completely Sold Out… but you can STILL get a copy. I told you he was demented!

‘Unkle’ Pigors is offering a very special Halloween-cover, numbered and signed edition of the book, strictly limited to 30 precious copies. The hardcover, 120-page, full-color book comes augmented with 50 new drawings, and it all goes for 40 well-wasted smackeroos. Go ahead, give your eyeballs a treat!

Get it direct from the master at Toxictoons and tell him Frankensteinia sent you.

Frankenskulls

Picking up on my Skull of Frankenstein post, Max, The Drunken Severed Head (by the way, he’s demented, too!) has posted some wild morphing x-rays (by dadabigelow) of the Frankenstein Monster’s crazy cranium.

Fun stuff!

Haram Alek Screencaps

I originally mentioned the fascinating, Egyptian-made Haram Alek (1953), aka Ismail Yassin Meets Frankenstein, in my Frankenstein Gets Knocked-Off post.

Here are some screencaps of the Monster (actor unknown), referred to in the picture as “The Mummy”. The arched brow, big chin and wide mouth makes him look a bit like Herman Munster, don’t you think?

The scratched face in the bottom picture is the result of a close encounter with The Wolfman.

And here are your bonus pics for today: The Dracula and Wolfman characters from the movie.

Dr. Frankenstein : Rosalba Neri

Here’s a necessary addition to the Lady Frankenstein post. I originally focused on Joseph Cotten, but here’s the other Dr. Frankenstein from that film: The fabulous Rosalba Neri.

The Skull of Frankenstein

He didn’t go easy.

He was beaten and burned, drugged and drowned. He was blown up, buried alive, shot, stoned, flash frozen, crushed under collapsing castles and blasted by lightning. He was dunked in quicksand, swept away by a dynamited dam, and dropped from heights into boiling sulfur.

There is no record of the ultimate catastrophe that claimed this apocalyptic, artificial life, but, well, it looks like they finally got him. Here, on display, is the unmistakable skull of Frankenstein’s Monster, with its deformed bone forehead and the clamped-on, rusty iron brainpan lid.

This superb piece is the creation of American sculptor Thomas Scott Kuebler. You can examine the Frankenstein skull from all its eerie angles here. Kuebler has also made companion pieces for Quasimodo and Nosferatu, but the skull collection is a very small part of his work. The full-figure Monster at left is but a glimpse of his unique talent.

T.S.Kuebler’s intricate, life-size and life-like mixed media sculptures depict mad scientists, witches, vampires, sideshow freaks, and all sorts of extraordinary beings brought to three-dimensional life.

Prepare to be astonished. T.S.Kuebler’s site features jaw-dropping galleries of his creations. 

It doesn’t get better than this.

See also T.S.Kuebler's Frankenstein.

Dr. Frankenstein : Joseph Cotten

"Orson Welles lists Citizen Kane as his best film, Alfred Hitchcock opts for Shadow of a Doubt and Sir Carol Reed chose The Third Man - and I'm in all of them.”

— Joseph Cotten.

As time went on, there weren’t as many choice roles available to the veteran actor. Being a little less particular about the parts he played allowed him to keep working regularly.

In La Figlia di Frankenstein (Frankenstein’s Daughter), released in English as Lady Frankenstein, Joseph Cotten contributed a measure of class, marginal marquee value, and roughly 30 minutes of screen time.

Early on, Cotten, as Baron Frankenstein, is crunched by his goofy-looking, bubble-domed Monster. His daughter steps up and continues his experiments, doffing her clothes along the way. This was to be expected as the role was played by cult-movie bombshell Rosalba Neri (billed in the US as “Sarah Bay”).

Besides Neri, always eminently watchable, and a palpable Hammer Films influence, this one's for unrepentant B-Movie enthusiasts and 70’s Eurosleaze connoiseurs only.

The film is Public Domain and googling will turn up several free download sites. I recommend Video with Bibi’s Lady Frankenstein page.

Neato Frankenstein

Neato Coolville is a place filled with Tiki motels, wax museums, penny arcades, haunted house attractions, and glowing neon signs. There’s a 25-foot Mr. Muffler on Main Street, tailfin cars at the Drive-In, and Korla Pandit is playing the local lounge every night.

It’s where old toys go to retire. Not the kind of mint-in-the-box, museum quality, collector’s don’t-touch-‘em toys, but the real, storied ones, the ones that were played with, like the Remco Frankenstein Action Figure beautifully photographed above, proudly wearing its scuffs and scrapes.

Neato Coolville is the very appropriate name of “Mayor” Todd Franklin’s blog. It’s a great stop for the nostalgic — you’ll rediscover those Star Wars bubble gum cards you collected as a kid — but this is also pop culture archeology, a repository of essential art, once mass-produced and ubiquitous, now rare or out of style, offering a spellbinding glimpse into the fast-fleeting past.

Clicking around Todd’s blog, you’ll find plenty of Frankenstein fun, including a giant axe-wielding statue in Burbank, and a stopover in — of all places — Frankenstein, Missouri. For sheer Pop Frankenstein ecstasy, check out Neato Coolville’s Monsterville photoset on Flickr, full of toys, comic book ads, posters and novelties.

You know, I wonder sometimes what Mary Shelley would make of, say, a Frankenstein Pez dispenser.

Doc Frankenstein

The Frankenstein myth really gets a workout in Doc Frankenstein, a comic book created by Geof Darrow and Steve Skroce, written and published by Larry and Andy Wachowski of The Matrix fame.

The story picks up where Mary Shelley left off. The Monster survives his self-imposed arctic isolation and returns to the world as an indestructible, pulp-style avenger fighting the zealot armies of the religious right. Or something like that. This book is not for the politically timid or the easily offended.

The script rants and roars unapologetically, and Skroce’s intricate and robust art features over the top action and bracing gore. Explosions abound and characters, supernatural and human, are regularly dismembered in loving detail. This is the kick-ass school of storytelling, with a touch of twisted humor thrown in for good measure.

The creation scene pictured above (note the cross-shaped slab) is but a small fraction of a much larger panel. You can see the whole thing in great detail, as well as samples from every issue of the comic book on the very generously illustrated Burlyman Entertainment site. The image at left is an alternate preview cover by co-creator Geof Darrow.

The saga of Doc Frankenstein has suffered somewhat from a highly irregular publication schedule, mostly attributed to the Wachowski’s film commitments. A belated sixth issue is due out in November, promising nothing less than “The Blasphemous Never Before Told Origin Story of GOD!”. 

You can order from the publisher, or you might want to reserve a copy at your local comic shop, try an issue, see if you like it, and hope for a graphic novel compilation of the series.

Frankenstein in Motion

A brilliant solution for a Frankenstein poster, using photography.

A face seems to form out of the blur, indecipherable and unsettling. It changes even as we look.

The kinetic poster and distressed graphics were created by Dutch designer Peter Boorsma for the Noortje Licht Theatre Company’s Frankenstein (2007). Boorsma websites here and here.

The Director : Terence Fisher

In 1957, The Curse of Frankenstein ignited a new age of cinema gothic. The film, wildly successful worldwide, instantly transformed the careers of its stars, Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee and Hazel Court. It propelled Hammer Films of England to a position as the dominant and highly influential horror film factory — perhaps one should say “boutique” — of the era. It also established the signature Hammer style, with rich colors, elegant costumes, intricate sets and accomplished casts that belied its low-budget underpinnings.

The Curse of Frankenstein was directed with considerable aplomb by Terence Fisher. It would be the turning point of a career that already counted over 30 films. He would almost exclusively devote himself to horror from then on, retooling such characters as Dracula, Dr. Jekyll, the Werewolf and The Phantom of the Opera. Even his Sherlock Holmes movie, The Hound of the Baskervilles, played as gothic horror.

Fisher would direct all but one of Peter Cushing’s six Frankenstein films, plotting the character’s cruel career from youthful arrogance to desperate old age. It is a unique and ever engrossing set of films.

Fisher was known to trust his cast and crew, intervening only to help them focus on the context of the scene at hand. Fisher’s true contribution was cerebral. His films are deeply iconoclastic studies of men and women seduced by evil, pushing at the limits of morality.

It is significant that these films, usually shot in six expeditious weeks with bargain budgets, are still being researched and analyzed today, 27 years after Terence Fisher’s death. This summer, the Cinémathèque Française in Paris held a vast, month-long retrospective of Fisher’s films, screening no less than 40 different titles, celebrating “the exemplary coherence of Terence Fisher’s oeuvre”.

Richard Klemensen’s Little Shop of Horrors, an indispensable magazine devoted to the study of Hammer Films, has just come out with an entire issue about Terence Fisher.

Considering LSoH’s perfect record, I can recommend this one with complete confidence, sight unseen. You can order directly from the publisher, here.

Terence Fisher’s filmography.

The Frankenstein montage painting, by Mark Maddox, appears in the Terence Fisher issue of The Little Shoppe of Horror. Click through to see it, and other art, including the cover of the issue, at glorious full size.

Young Frankenstein Lives Again

This post is part of the First Annual 2007 Slapstick Blog-a-thon coordinated by Thom Ryan at Film of the Year. Click and see a list of all the participating bloggers.

Just like Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein before it, Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder’s Young Frankenstein spawned its share of imitators. For one, there was a rather miserable David Niven comedy called Old Dracula, but the kicker must be Sevimli Frankestayn, aka Turkish Young Frankenstein, a spectacularly inept shot for shot remake that plays like a straight horror film. In other words, a knock-off of a classic satire… that misses the joke!

At 81, Mel Brooks is the Elder Statesman of Slapstick. In November, in case you haven’t heard, he’s reviving Young Frankenstein as a big budget Broadway musical. The tryouts in Seattle have been widely publicized on TV and the Net.

Watch Brooks making his pitch on entertainment news shows, available on YouTube here and here. There is some overlap between the two clips, but you get a glimpse of the very elaborate sets that include a rising slab, complete with lightning bolts. Here’s a fine Seattle Times article, and a slideshow (pics by Greg Gilbert) of actor Schuler Hensley — who also played the Monster in the film Van Helsing — being transformed into a very green Frankenstein Monster, and this Playbill feature has good pictures (by Paul Kolnik) of the very energetic cast. The official website for the Young Frankenstein musical is here.

Frankenstein Meets The Mermaid

This weekend, the New York Times carries an article called “Monster, Meet Mermaid”. Turns out the competition for Young Frankenstein won’t be the other Frankenstein Musical opening at the same time, but rather the big new Disney show, The Little Mermaid. Now, how’s this for trivia: This is not the first time that a comedy-based Frankenstein Monster meets a Mermaid. Back in ‘48, at Universal, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein was shooting concurrently with the William Powell fantasy, Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid. Glenn Strange and Anne Blythe, both in costume, posed for a neat publicity shot.

All we need now is for Young Frankenstein’s Schuler Hensley and The Little Mermaid’s Sierra Boggess to get together and close the circle. Do it on January 1st, and it'll be a 60th year reunion!

And that wraps up my contribution to the Slapstick Blog-a-Thon. I had a ball! I was introduced to some great blogs, I read some terrific posts, and I made some new friends. Here’s a pie in the face to Thom Ryan at Film of the Year who made it all happen. Thanks, Thom, and congratulations on a job well done.

Frankenstein Gets Knocked-Off

This post is part of the First Annual 2007 Slapstick Blog-a-thon coordinated by Thom Ryan at Film of the Year. Click and see a list of all the participating bloggers.

Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein was a hit everywhere it played. I love the German title and the Jack Davis-style artwork on the above poster.

I saw French-dubbed version, Deux Nigauds (“Two nincompoops!”) contre Frankenstein, in a theater when I was a kid. No, I’m not THAT old. It was in the early 60s, and the film, incredibly, was still making the rounds in second-run houses a full 15 years after its original release.

Bud and Lou exploited the new formula, going on to “Meet” The Killer (aka The Killer, Boris Karloff), The Invisible Man, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and The Mummy. They even worked the monsters, including the newly minted Creature from the Black Lagoon, into their television routines.

Outside the USA and, presumably, beyond the grasp of Universal’s legal department, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein would spawn countless imitations, some of which amounted to unauthorized, unabashed remakes, which is a polite way of saying “plagiarism”.

An Egyptian-made copy, in 1953, stands out as a jaw-dropping, scene for scene clone of the original. The film, called Haram alek — which somewhat appropriately translates as “Shame On You!” — is also known as Ismail Yassin Meets Frankenstein.

Mexican movie comics stepped in with a slew of knockoffs, some of them quite accomplished. El Castillo de los monstruos (Castle of Monsters) in 1958, had Clavillazo dealing with a very human-like Frankenstein (the neck bolts gave him away) plus a mummy, a gorilla, an alligator pit, and the lagoon’s Gill-Man. Best of all, the great German Robles cameos as El Vampiro. Here’s a fun YouTube clip from the film where most of the monstruos appear.

The prolific, rubber-faced superstar comic Tin Tan made several excursions into the ghost and monsters genre, notably El Fantasma de la operetta and La casa del terror, both in 1960. La casa drew Lon Chaney, Jr. south of the border to play opposite the pachuco-style comic as a mummy who, once revived, turns into a werewolf. Nice combo, there! The film was notoriously recycled in the States as a straight horror film. Chaney’s footage was edited in with new, cheaply shot scenes and the whole incomprehensible mess was released as Face of the Screaming Werewolf in 1964.

Other Mexican-made variations included Pepito y el monstruos (1957), A Locura del terror (1969), Chabelo y Pepito contra los monstruos (1973), and Capulina vs los monstruos (1964). Most of these are available today on DVD if you care to Google around.

Of all the Mexican facsimiles, the one most faithful to Abbott and Costello’s original concept was Frankestein: El vampiro y compania (Frankestein (sic), the Vampire and Company), made in 1961 as a vehicle for Tin Tan’s brother, Manuel “Loco” Valdez. Here’s a write-up on that one.

Few movies have exercised as deep and wide an influence as Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein has. Even fewer were ever copied in such detail. Homage or rip-off, you decide.

In the end, the original is still the best.

Update: Screencaps from the Egyptian-made Haram alek posted here.

Related:
Frankenstein Gets Knocked Off
El Castillo de los Monstruos

Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein

This post is part of the First Annual 2007 Slapstick Blog-a-thon. Click to see a list of participating bloggers and links to all the Blog-a-thon posts through the weekend.

My contribution, an essay, is a bit of an experiment, a departure from the short post format of this blog. Let me know what you think.

The Brain of Frankenstein

By the mid-40s, Universal’s Monsters were played out. It’s as if the studio was bereft of new ideas for the characters, or perhaps box office projections suggested that Frankenstein, Dracula or The Wolfman couldn’t carry a picture on their own any more. The menacing trio was still being revived, but only as a group. They came bundled together, three for the price of one, in “Monster Rally” films with template titles: House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula, in 1944 and ‘45.

It looked like the days of the great Universal Monsters had passed, and the once proud bogeymen would fade away without so much as a whimper.

Then Robert Arthur had an idea.

In late 1946, Arthur, the producer in charge of Abbott and Costello movies, was kicking ideas around and he came up with something about a mad doctor chasing the Boys, determined to stuff Lou Costello’s addled brains into the Frankenstein Monster’s cranium. Studio bosses suggested he throw Dracula and The Wolfman in, use the whole squad, and maybe it would amount to something.

A couple of script treatments were turned out and quickly discarded. One dreadful version had the Monsters defeated after being shrunk down to doll size. It was only when the project was handed over to Robert Lees and Frederic Rinaldo that it gelled.

The two writers loved the concept and attacked it with passion. They crafted a script, called The Brain of Frankenstein, that was unlike anything the Boys had done before. The story was solid and it raced to a genuine climax. It had strong supporting parts, including a female villain. The Monsters stayed in character, genuinely menacing, something to play off of, not play with. The script had new and original sight gags in it, good dialog and new jokes.

Lou hated it.

For all their talent, Bud and Lou were not innovators. The routines they mastered had been honed to perfection years earlier, in Vaudeville. The Boys had come to know what worked for them and they felt no need to experiment. Critics of the time complained about Abbott and Costello serving up “the same old corn” in picture after picture, but the public didn’t seem to mind at all.

It’s almost impossible, today, to grasp the magnitude of Abbott & Costello’s popularity. They had a huge constituency of fans, having been on radio continuously for over a decade. They played personal appearance gigs to packed houses. They made two pictures a year, but with older titles constantly re-issued, you could have 6 or 7 Abbott & Costello comedies in circulation every year. The fans just couldn’t get enough of them. The Boys were box-office gold.

Typically, an Abbott and Costello script started with a basic plot outline over which, through several drafts, gags and routines were added. Bud and Lou barely glanced at their scripts, relying on longtime friend and gagman supreme John Grant to look out for them, and fix or rewrite as needed. When the jokes got stale, the routines repetitious, the Boys could still find a way to wring an extra laugh out of them. Chubby, cheerful Lou Costello ad-libbed recklessly, and if all else failed, he’d fall back on hoots, howls and spectacular pratfalls to sell a gag. The lanky and morose Bud Abbott — the best straight man in the business — knew instinctively how much rope to give out and when to yank Lou back into the routine.

The new script was a challenge, and the Boys, at first, were uncomfortable with it. It came with all the jokes written down, all the gags and situations worked out. Only a couple of stock routines made it in, a “moving candle” gag, and a scene where Lou mistakes the real Wolfman for Bud was a variation on a bit the Boys were familiar with. It speaks to the script’s originality and cleverness that even those old stunts work in context and come off as fresh.

The Monster : Glenn Strange

Bud and Lou often complained, not without reason, of being saddled with uninspired supporting casts composed of clock-punching contract players. This time, they had no cause for worry.

Lon Chaney, Jr. reprised his signature role as the terminally anguished Larry Talbot. He’s a good guy, working with Bud and Lou to prevent Dracula from reviving the dangerous Frankenstein Monster, but he’s also a walking time bomb who can morph into The Wolfman and turn on the Boys at any moment. A nice surprise was seeing Bela Lugosi, in great form, don the Dracula cape again. The part had been essayed most recently by John Carradine, in top hat and fake mustache, while Lugosi had languished as a Poverty Row villain. Here, Lugosi was given a good, substantial role, and he handled himself with Continental aplomb, dignity intact, while the comics whirled around him. It was to be Bela’s last major film.

The cast of principals was rounded out with Jane Randolph as Lou’s sweetheart, Lenore Aubert as the evil and fatale Dr. Mornay, and the part of the Monster was assured, again, by Glenn Strange.

Strange had played the Monster in two previous outings but his screen time had been limited to being strapped on a slab until the final reel when, spurred by some mad scientist and his obligatory hunchbacked assistant, he rose, growled at the torch-carrying mob, and promptly walked into some quicksand, or a wall of fire. The End.

This time, the Monster was used throughout the picture, and he had the best, most fun scenes interacting with Bud and Lou.

Strange played the character as a stoic hulk, moving slowly and deliberately, hands out, like a blind automaton on remote control. His performance is rarely given the credit it deserves, but watch him closely in this film. This isn’t just a stuntman clomping around, it’s a real performance in pantomime. In a couple of scenes, incrementally sitting up at Dracula's command, or mechanically climbing the stairs in the gorgeous island dock set, Strange moves with such clockwork precision that it almost feels like the film has slowed down. His timing, always half a second late in reacting, is robot perfect.

Glenn Strange made a career as a character actor in Westerns. As The Monster, he was eclipsed by Karloff, Chaney and Lugosi who had all played the part in “serious” pictures. Strange was thought of as the fill-in Frankenstein, the one who got the part only after the part was discounted. But it was Glenn Strange who would give the Monster its pop culture profile. When the classic, flat-top makeup was applied to his wide, craggy face, it gave him a big, square, boxlike head, and this look became the Frankenstein trademark, better suited for toys and Halloween masks than Boris Karloff’s sensitive features.

Shooting on The Brain of Frankenstein began on February 5, 1948.

Cult Status

The Boys pulled their usual on-set antics, playing a marathon game of poker in their dressing room and refusing to come out for rehearsals. When they did made it to the stage, shooting would be regularly interrupted by the frenetic Bobby Barber, Lou's personal stooge, hired to create pandemonium and keep the company in good spirits. Universal crewmen reportedly loved working on Abbott and Costello pictures. Veteran director Charles Barton calmly steered the picture through all the chaos.

The only incident of note came when a stunt went wrong and Glenn Strange snapped his ankle. Lon Chaney, a good sport, offered to stand in as The Monster and that’s him throwing Lenore Aubert’s double through the window. Strange returned to the set a few days later, wearing a leg brace. Another incident, much happier, involved a scene where Lou backs into a chair and inadvertently sits in the Monster’s lap. His predicament dawns on him when he realizes that he has too many hands. Take after take, Glenn Strange, who was called upon to keep a straight, stone face, couldn’t help but break up. No amount of editing could salvage the scene and the two men had to be called back later on for retakes.

The film’s shooting title, The Brain of Frankenstein, sounded too much like a straight horror film. When it was released, in August ’48, it was called, simply, Abbott and Costello Meets Frankenstein. To Universal’s delight, preview audiences whooped as soon as the title appeared onscreen.

In retrospect, it was an early case of product branding. Comedians and monsters had mixed it up before, but these were not your humdrum haunted house ghosts or the escaped cheapsuit gorillas that had stalked everyone from the Ritz Brothers to the Bowery Boys. Abbott and Costello — household names to begin with — were tangling with Frankenstein! The Wolf Man! And Dracula! These were characters established over almost two decades worth of films. Their names had weight and significance.

The film was a runaway hit, the 3rd biggest box office attraction of 1948, and it gave Bud and Lou a whole new formula to exploit. Over the next few years, they would go on to “Meet” all the monsters they could scare up, from The Invisible Man to The Mummy.

Critics of the time were kind to the film, but it would take a few more years for it to be recognized as the comedy classic that it is. When horror films finally came under scholarly scrutiny, A&C Meet Frankenstein was generally regarded as an insult, the final ignominy for monsters whose potency had been slowly eroded through increasingly cheap sequels.

In an article for Sight and Sound (April-June 1952), Curtis Harrington — who had been a friend of James Whale — wrote that Abbott and Costello Meets Frankenstein was “the final death agony of James Whale’s originally marvelous creation”. Carlos Clarens, in his seminal Illustrated History of the Horror Film (1967), lumped the film along with the portmanteau House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula, stating that “unconscious parody finally gave way to deliberate spoof” and adding, “By then, Universal was flogging a dead horse”.

Boris Karloff was known to glower whenever the film was mentioned, though he had gamely accepted to pose for publicity pictures, standing in line to see the film in New York, and he had gone on to play in two pictures with the Boys, Abbott and Costello Meet The Killer, and Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Lon Chaney, Jr., who’d had a ball making the film, came to believe its pernicious influence had killed off the old monsters.

But, of course, the monsters not only survived, their reputations grew. Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein is an intelligent and vastly entertaining film. It was beautifully done. It has wonderful sets and a magnificent score by Frank Skinner. And it is still funny today. In the end, it was as generous, respectful and deeply-felt an homage to the classic Monsters as, say, Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder’s Young Frankenstein was.

Universal’s Frankenstein, Dracula and The Wolfman did not fade away, they went out with a bang in a fabulous film, a true and glorious Last Hurrah. More importantly, Abbott and Costello Meets Frankenstein, with its reverent use of Universal’s classic monsters, forever cemented their reputation as dominant icons of popular culture.

References:

Abbott and Costello Meets Frankenstein on DVD.

Abbott and Costello in Hollywood, by Bob Furmanek and Ron Palumbo (Perigee Books, 1991). Out of print. You can still find a copy through Amazon Sellers or AbeBooks.

Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein: Universal Filmscripts Series, by Philip J. Riley (Magicimage Books, 1990).