My Secret Identity Revealed!

Blast it, I’ve been unmasked!

Actually, no big deal. I’ve posted personal moviegoing anecdotes here, but I’ve kept my private pursuits and professional activities off this blog because this place is about Mary’s Monster. This blog is meant as a resource and, I hope, an entertainment, entirely devoted to all things Frankenstein, and I want to keep it focused.

As it happens, I've won a career award (the official announcement is here... Look for 'Pierre Fournier') and some fellow bloggers have posted about it so, cover blown, I thought I should share the news with you, my friends and readers.

John Cozzoli of Zombos Closet of Horror posted about it here, with biographical links. He’s the one who came up with the funny “secret identity” angle. Vince Liaguno of Slasher Speak gave me a shout out, too. Thanks, gentlemen!

And gentlemen aside, it was my friend (?) Max of The Drunken Severed Head who first blew the whistle and posted a fairly recent pic of yours truly. No worries, I’ll get even.

So there you go. Now let’s get back to Frankenstein.

Vincent Price and Christopher Lee

It’s a wonderful coincidence… Peter Cushing was born on May 26 and, today, May 27, we celebrate Vincent Price (1911-1993) and Christopher Lee (born in 1922). Three horror icons, contemporaries, sharing birthdays on two consecutive dates. Even better, the three men were good friends.

Vincent Price played literate, highbrow villains and haunted men who wore their doom like penance. He also enjoyed sending up his roles and did so often, with glee. In a Frankenstein register, Price played the patchworked, retrofitted Dr. Phibes, and he was The Inventor who put Johnny Depp’s Edward Scissorhands together.

Of his meeting Christopher Lee in 1968, Price said, “I had heard he was very pompous, and I was really a little worried about meeting him. Well, we took one look at each other and started laughing… We find each other hysterically funny.”

Christopher Lee had a similar experience a dozen years earlier meeting Peter Cushing when he reported to the set of The Curse of Frankenstein. Lee wrote, “Our very first encounter began with me storming into his dressing-room and announcing in petulant tones, ‘I haven’t got any lines!’ He looked up, his mouth twitched and he said dryly, ‘You’re lucky. I’ve read the script.”

With that, the two men were instant and permanent friends.

It was a hard-working but happy set. “I was never so content”, Lee said. He would entertain the crew singing opera while encased in head-to-foot monster bandages. Playing the Frankenstein Monster launched Lee on a superlative career as a movie villain, much like it had done his friend and neighbor, the elderly Boris Karloff. There is no evidence the two men ever discussed the role they shared, but the Frankenstein Monster was certainly good to both of them.

Lee, a robust 86 years old, is still very active and very much in demand. Among the blockbusters he appeared in recently, he played Count Dooku, closing out the Star Wars series that his old friend Peter Cushing had helped launch.

Lee’s official website features a Christmas Day video message in which he tells the wonderful story behind his colorful Christmas hat. It’s worth clicking through to hear it.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Lee!

Quotes are from Vincent Price, A Daughter’s Biography by Victoria Price, and Christopher Lee’s very entertaining autobiography, Tall, Dark and Gruesome, still available from Midnight Marquee Press. A new, reworked version is available, now called Lord of Misrule: The Autobiography of Christopher Lee.

Wiki pages for Vincent Price and Christopher Lee.

Christopher Lee sings! One of several clips available on YouTube.

Peter Cushing

Captured in oils by the great Basil Gogos on a cover of Famous Monsters, Peter Cushing was born on this day, May 26, in 1913.

In 1956, Cushing was at the peak of his powers. Stage-struck at an early age, he already had over 25 years of distinguished work in the theater under his belt. His award-winning live performances in the new medium of television made him immensely popular in Great Britain. Upon hearing that a small studio, Hammer Films, was preparing a new version of Frankenstein, Cushing asked his agent, John Redway, to suggest him for the part of the Baron.

With the phenomenal success of The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Cushing film career was launched. He would become one of the great horror film stars, playing a wide range of parts, sinister or heroic. He essayed the sinister Baron Frankenstein in six fascinating films.

Much earlier, as a fledgling actor in 1939, Cushing’s first brush with the cinema had an interesting Frankenstein connection to it. The young Cushing had boldly set out for Hollywood, half a world away from his native England. He was promptly hired to work with Louis Hayward in The Man in the Iron Mask.

Heyward played twins, interacting with himself through special effects. It was Cushing who played opposite Heyward in these scenes, his work to be discarded after the split-screen process was assembled. Cushing was rewarded with a small onscreen part. The director of the film was none other than James Whale. Barely four years after making his masterpiece, The Bride of Frankenstein, Whale was directing the actor who would one day become the busiest Doctor Frankenstein of them all.

Another interesting meeting occurred shortly thereafter, when Cushing was invited to play a game of cricket with a team of British expats that included another Dr. Frankenstein, Basil Rathbone, and the master Monster himself, Boris Karloff.

Cushing’s Hollywood adventure ended when, patriotically moved to “do his bit” for the war effort, and admittedly “desperately homesick”, he decided to return home, hopping cross country to the East coast.

I was fascinated to learn that Cushing stopped briefly in my hometown, Montreal, lodging and working nights at the YMCA and taking a job as an usher at the Loews Theater. Where Cushing stayed exactly is not known, as there were several YMCA buildings downtown, but I’d like to think he might have stopped in at the one in Old Montreal, the first WMCA in North America, circa 1851, a fabulous building still standing and converted into a boutique hotel.

Cushing, writing in his 1986 autobiography, tells a funny story about picking up some film work in Montreal as a prop builder, fabricating rising sun and swastika flags for the British film The 49th Parallel, partially shot in Québec. Discovering the enemy insignia, an alarmed chambermaid caused Cushing to be arrested as an axis spy by the Mounties. The problem with the anecdote is that Powell and Pressburger’s epic was finished and released a year earlier, in 1941. Perhaps additional scenes were shot, or Cushing’s contributions were for promotional purposes but, as things stand, the dates don’t jibe.

As for the Loews where Cushing ushered, it was built in 1917 as Canada’s biggest, grandest movie and vaudeville house. Designed by Scots-born New Yorker Thomas Lamb, considered the greatest of all the theater architects, it answered the plaster opulence and flashy faux marble of its competitors with real Botticini marble stairs, vast frescoes, grandiose promenades and a unique elliptical mezzanine. Will Rogers, Red Skelton and Milton Berle were regular performers there. Groucho Marx fondly recalled honing his craft at the Loews, and joked about picking up a disease in that great sin city up north.

Come the sixties, I remember walking the Loews’ grandiose corridor to the cavernous lobby and down the swooshing staircase to the 2800 seat auditorium, glowing with dark blue lights, like an underwater palace. As a teenager, I saw the early James Bond movies there and Cushing himself in the upscale Hammer spectacle She (1965). I wonder if, decked out in his “bum freezer” uniform, escorting patrons to their seats in 1942, Cushing ever imagined himself giant size, up there on that screen.

Cushing returned to Montreal as a movie star 35 years later to shoot The Uncanny in which the character he plays meets his death on a frozen sidewalk. Appropriately, the Québécois title for the film was “Brrr”. The same year, 1977, Cushing signed one of his most famous roles as the galactically evil Grand Moff Tarkin — He even bosses Darth Vader around! — in Star Wars. Director George Lucas mostly shot the actor from the waist up, allowing him to swap his rigid leather jackboots for a pair of comfortable carpet slippers.

Cushing’s last hurrah was co-narrating — with his friend Christopher Lee — the comprehensive Hammer Films history Flesh and Blood: The Hammer Heritage of Horror, written and directed by Ted Newsom. The documentary was broadcast on the BBC in two parts, on consecutive weekends, in August 1994. Cushing passed away that very week, between the two broadcasts, on August eleven.

The photograph from Man in the Iron Mask and biographical notes found in Peter Cushing's two autobiographies, collected together as An Autobiography and Past Forgetting, highly recommended, from Midnight Marquee Press.

Photo of the Loews theater from Montreal Movie Palaces: Great Theatres of the Golden Era, 1884-1938, by Dane Lanken (1993).

Peter Cushing Wiki page, and the BFI’s ScreenOnline page. The Peter Cushing Association site.

Holger Hass posts twelve wonderful watercolors by Peter Cushing on his Hammer and Beyond blog.

Three I Might Have Saved

Arbogast, whose blog is essential reading, holds forth on horror films like someone shaking the cage to wake the beast within. He’s looking for movement, purpose. He wants to see the little bugger bite back, show some character. His reviews and opinions are wildly entertaining and uncommonly insightful.

In a recent post, Arbogast reflected on our affection for certain doomed movie characters, how their cinematic deaths affect us, and who among them would be The one you might have saved. The idea has circulated like a slow-motion blogathon, and Arbo keeps a list of participating blogs on his sidebar. Check it out for some very interesting and sometimes surprising posts on the subject.

Victims, of course, are necessary in horror films. It is not sufficient for monsters to threaten, lives must be taken for the shock to operate. The doomed must die. The mechanism of horror fiction demands that none survive. That’s how we get on with the story. The purpose of the fable is to rattle us for a couple of hours and then release us back to safety. Sometimes, we’re just rattled a little harder than usual, and we find ourselves mourning a movie victim.

Reflecting on the topic from my Frankencentric point of view, I came up with three deaths I find deplorable. The first is that of the child, little Maria, in the 1931 film.

Maria (Marilyn Harris) doesn’t fear The Monster, she takes his hand and invites him to play with her, and she elicits his first and only smile. Boris Karloff remarked how children were always attracted to the Monster. For the fictional Maria, the attraction was deadly, and all the more appalling that it was a horrible accident. The Monster throws the child into the lake to see her float like the flowers did.

The death of the child was meant to shock, and it did sufficiently for censors to order the sequence clipped short, but still we see Maria’s limp body paraded in town, and the meaning is clear. It is the manifest price of Frankenstein’s folly and it seals his Monster’s fate.

Another disturbing death comes as Bride of Frankenstein (1935) races to its climax. Colin Clive’s neurotic Frankenstein needs a heart, a strong, fresh one, for the experiment to succeed. “A female victim of sudden death,” he specifies, sending out Dr. Pretorius’ lugubrious henchman, Karl (Dwight Frye), with the promise of a thousand Crown reward.

After Karl runs off, mumbling something about his knife, Frankenstein adds, “There are always accidental deaths occuring…”, an afterthought that sounds like delusional justification.

In a very short night scene, fade in and out, a girl walks briskly on street. Karl leaps out of the shadows and throws a scarf over her head. On the soundtrack, we hear a bass drum heartbeat.

Cut straight to the lab, where Frankenstein exults, “It’s beating perfectly! Just as in life!”

As the elaborate creation scene unfolds and the bandaged creature is lightning-struck to life, music cresting, the pounding, unmistakable heartbeat is heard again. It is the song of the dead girl’s heart, carved out and repurposed to power The Bride.

The unfortunate victim who’s demise affected me most was Justine, Frankenstein’s maid and mistress in The Curse of Frankenstein (1957).

As Baron Frankenstein, Peter Cushing is singularly cruel. Colin Clive’s Frankenstein was a nervous wreck, obtuse and blind to the abominable crimes he set off like a row of falling dominos. Cushing’s merit, so to speak, was to be deliberately and consciously cold-blooded. He knows what he’s doing. We see him shove an old man through a railing to the floor below, call it an accident, and then blithely scoop the brain out for his experiments. “He has no further use for it,” he says.

As for Justine, she is not killed purposefully. She is not harvested for parts, like some anonymous villager sacrificed to mad science. Justine is simply eliminated because she has become troublesome, and she doesn’t get the benefit of a quick, painless death, either. The Baron has her step through a door into the horror of the dark room where his disjointed, brain-damaged Creature waits.

In the very next scene, Cushing’s prim and proper Baron is calmly having breakfast with his high-class fiancée, Hazel Court. “Pass the marmalade”, he says.

I hated to see Justine dispatched, and I’m sure it was all the more affecting because of the actress who played the part.

Valerie Gaunt was a vivid presence in Hammer’s two keystone pictures, The Curse of Frankenstein and (Horror of) Dracula. In Dracula, she played the vampire bride fixated on John Van Eyssen’s neck, whereupon Christopher Lee makes his spectacular, gore-face entrance, exploding into the room and throwing the hissing Gaunt around like a rag doll.

I suspect there’s a generation — the first wave, if you will — of Hammer fans who, on the basis of her supporting parts in these two films alone, were quite ready to be Valerie Gaunt followers for life but, incredibly, those two films were the only ones she ever made. Valerie Gaunt disappeared as suddenly and completely as Justine when she crossed that threshold.

Holger Hass, of HammerGlam, reports that Ms. Gaunt lives happily in anonymity, which is nice to know. There were other Hammer heroines to come and conquer our hearts, but I wish I had seen more of Valerie Gaunt.

See Valerie Gaunt in the original trailer for The Curse of Frankenstein, and as the Vampire Bride in (Horror of) Dracula.

The Covers of Frankenstein : Horror Monsters No. 10

I always thought the monsters on the cover of Horror Monsters number 10 (winter 1974) looked cute and cuddly, like wide-eyed kiddy versions of the Teenage Frankenstein, Teenage Werewolf, and Christopher Lee’s Frankenstein Monster.

Despite the NEW! banner over the logo, this was the last issue of the title. It would also be curtains for its sister publication, Mad Monsters, as Charlton Publications cashed out of the movie monster magazine sweepstakes. The end must have been in sight as the editors made a last ditch attempt at repurposing the magazine. An editorial promised that “future issues of the New Horror Monsters… will bring you actual fantastic cases of people, like you, changing into hideous monsters, possessed creatures, distorted and inhuman!”

New features in this issue included a short piece of horror fiction, The Monster in the Tomb by Samuel Gogel, and a “true fact” article on vampires (illustrated with movie stills) by Dr. K. Kalman, “Professor of the Occult, the Mystic, Black Magic, and Vampirism”. Otherwise the issue contained the usual photo features, and a space-filling alphabetical Horror Reader. The Frankenstein entry goes, “F is for Frankenstein/Known by all horror fen/As the creep who was made/From parts of dead men!”

As with all the Charlton horror movie mags, the cover artist, editors and feature writers are not identified, though some of the material shows a good knowledge of the films covered. The Charlton titles were a cheaply produced, a little crude, a little gaudy, and a lot of fun.

My previous Charlton magazine posts: Horror Monsters No.2, and Mad Monsters No.5.

The Assistant : Dwight Frye

The subject of my previous post, the animated Igor movie, trades on the cliché of the mad scientist’s pop-eyed, hunchbacked assistant. The seminal cinematic influence is, of course, “Fritz”, Frankenstein’s aide in the 1931 film, played convincingly by Dwight Frye — but the concept harks back even further.

There is no assistant in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, but the character appeared very early on, as soon as 1823, in the very first Frankenstein play, Presumption!; or, The Fate of Frankenstein, penned by Richard Brinsley Peake. The role of Fritz was tailored for the diminutive comic actor Robert Keeley, playing the servant as a bouncing bundle of nerves. He opens the play, singing, “Oh, dear me! What’s the matter? How I shake at each clatter. My Marrow, they harrow. Oh, dear me! What’s the matter?”

Helping to compress the novel into a short theatrical experience, Fritz serves as narrator, speaking asides to the audience and providing comic relief. Perched on a stool, spying through latticework into the off-stage laboratory, he witnesses and describes the creation scene, “There’s a hob – hobgoblin, 20 feet high! Wrapp’d in a mantle… Mercy! Mercy!”

The play was such a success that it was immediately copied, literally in a matter of days. Frankenstein’s new notoriety even provoked Mary's father, William Godwin, into rushing out a second edition of the book. The copycat plays riffed off previous theatrical versions, laboratory aide usually included. In 1826, Frankenstein: or, The Man and the Monster, itself based on a French stage version called Le magicien et le monstre, features a servant named Strutt who, in an already predictable scene, climbs a ladder to a high window to peek into the forbidden laboratory and reports, “Oh, lord! That's too much for me! He's raising the devil -- he's blown off the top of the pavilion!”

By the time Universal Pictures began putting their own Frankenstein together in 1931, the book was almost ignored. It was plays and stage farces that fed the Frankenstein mythos. The film, in fact, would draw its inspiration from a British play called Frankenstein: An Adventure into the Macabre, by Peggy Webling.

As the film was being puzzled together through that fateful summer, scripts were commissioned and rewritten, directors changed and performers screen tested in the musical chairs game of casting, but the part of Fritz was locked in very early on. Who would play The Assistant was never an issue.

Actor Dwight Frye was coming off his spectacular turn as Renfield in Tod Browning’s Dracula. In a part that combined two characters from the Bram Stoker novel, Frye was required to go from stuck-up to unglued as the stalwart solicitor driven to bug-eating lunacy. Frye’s mad Renfield is the liveliest character in the film, his demented laughter far spookier than anything Bela Lugosi’s suave, continental menace can cook up.

Given the film’s phenomenal success, Universal was eager to cast the Dracula principals — Bela Lugosi, Edward van Sloan, and Frye — in their new chiller, Frankenstein. On June 16 and 17, 1931, the three men were reunited on the redressed Dracula set to shoot the now legendary (and lost) Frankenstein test footage. Ten days later, director Florey had been replaced by James Whale, and Lugosi would soon yield The Monster’s part to the relatively unknown Boris Karloff. Van Sloan and Fritz were retained, with Frye —originally mute — acquiring dialog after the script was tweaked to Whale’s specifications.

Whale reportedly studied Thomas Ince’s The Magician (1926), drawing inspiration for the laboratory sets. It is worth noting that the silent film featured a hunchbacked assistant, played by Henry Gibson, doing dirty deeds.

Frye’s Fritz scrabbles around, bent over, with filthy, disheveled hair and a scarred cheek. He uses a ridiculously short walking stick and pauses midway up the laboratory tower’s vertiginous staircase to pull up his socks. It is Fritz who sets the horror in motion, fumbling on the job and causing Frankenstein to unwittingly insert a criminal brain in the giant’s flat skull.

Cowardly and cruel, Fritz beats the helpless, chained Monster and terrorizes it with fire. Their confrontation on the surrealistic dungeon set plays out like a violent ballet. Censors demanded that closeups of a leering, sadistic Fritz be cut.

The character’s inevitably violent end comes offscreen, punctuated by a shriek, when the powerful Monster breaks his chains.

Dwight Frye’s film career both launched and peaked in 1931 with Dracula and Frankenstein. He also scored a meaty role in The Maltese Falcon as Wilmer (the Elisha Cook, Jr. part in the later Humphrey Bogart version), but thereafter, the talented Frye was mercilessly typecast, hired to replicate Renfield or Fritz in increasingly cheap programmers.

There would be one more memorably sordid Assistant role for the actor, as the beetle-browed Karl in Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein (1935). Not only does Karl rob graves and works a lab shift, he is an accessory to kidnapping, and murders a young woman for her “fresh” heart. Perhaps a sign of misfortune to come, an elaborate subplot illustrating Karl’s duplicity was edited out for length. In the end, a torch-wielding Frye and Karloff’s Monster grappled again, this time atop the stormy, thunderstruck tower, with Karl thrown to his death even as life is blasted into The Bride.

There is no actual evidence that Frye had a part in the third Universal Frankenstein, Son of Frankenstein (1939), despite persistent conjecture that he was cast as an angry villager. If so, it was another performance for the cutting-room floor. Subsequent roles, often uncredited, would be limited to walk-ons and bits as a valet, secretary, desk clerk, jury member, radio operator and “second mug”.

Frye popped up in two more Frankenstein entries, The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942) and Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman (1943), relegated to the background as a disgruntled villager in Tyrolean garb with few lines to speak.

Working nights as a draftsman at Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica, supporting the war effort and his family, the actor still hoped to revive his screen career when he died suddenly, of a heart attack, in 1943. He was only 44 years old.

Today, Dwight Frye is a cult figure, his signature roles immortalized in resin kits, his reputation sealed by an Alice Cooper song, The Ballad of Dwight Fry (no “e”). Frye’s creations, referenced and exaggerated by TV sketch comics in the 60’s and 70’s, are the unmistakable template for every mad scientist’s assistant or, for that matter, Dracula’s too. The Renfield and Fritz characters often merge, perhaps because the same actor played both parts back to back.

Memorable spinoffs include the canoe-footed vampire aide Koukol (Terry Downes) in The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967) and, of course, the inimitable Marty Feldman as Igor — pronounced Eye-Gor! — in Young Frankenstein (1974).

It was probably through this last film that the name “Igor” became permanently attached to the character’s caricature, completing the cliché. The name, spelled Ygor, was originally that of the broken-necked, snaggletooth blacksmith played by Bela Lugosi in Son of Frankenstein and The Ghost of Frankenstein.

Next time you spot a hunchbacked or otherwise damaged and demented lab assistant, a darkly humorous grave robbing ghoul or a lunatic vampire’s helper, played straight or funny, remember Dwight Frye. Though the concept of Frankenstein's Assistant evolved over more than a century’s worth of melodramatic and burlesque plays, it was Frye whose inspired performance forever crystallized the character in popular culture.

Presumption!; or, The Fate of Frankenstein (1823), the first Frankenstein play, by Richard Brinsley Peake.

Frankenstein: or, the Man and the Monster (1826), a play by Henry M. Milner.

A short online biography of Dwight Frye, and Wiki page.

One of many clips showing Alice Cooper performing “The Ballad of Dwight Fry”.

An excellent biography, Dwight Frye’s Last Laugh, written by Gregory William Mank, James T. Coughlin, and Dwight D. Frye.

Igor

Monster making is a labor-intensive proposition. Every mad scientist needs an Igor.

An Igor will run errands at all hours of the night, he’ll keep an eye out for disgruntled villagers and sweep the lab floor after a brain spill. Most importantly, a good Igor is always ready and eager to Throw The Switch on command. “Yes, Master!”

But what happens when an Igor has ideas of his own? What if an Igor thinks he can build a bigger, better Monster? That’s the rough idea behind Igor, a new computer-animated family feature coming this September from director Tony Leondis, with a script by Chris McKenna.
John Cusack heads an all-star cast of voice talent.

The trailer is up on the web, and we are promised comics, toys and a ton of merchandizing.

Trailer on Yahoo comes in your choice of sizes, including full screen HD.

Official movie site, and a “Be An Igor” contest.

The Stamps of Frankenstein

News has come that the Royal Mail of Great Britain will be issuing stamps celebrating Hammer Films this summer (2008). The set will include a Curse of Frankenstein stamp, based on the poster shown here.

Frankenstein philatelic history spans back a mere decade. In 1997, Royal Mail plans for a Mary Shelley bicentennial stamp were abandoned, and — not for the first time — the author was supplanted by her creation. A Tales of Terror set appeared, itself a subset of an ongoing Tales and Legends series, featuring four famous British monsters painted in a vigorous caricature style by Ian Pollock. The watercolors included a bushy-haired Dracula, a split-face Jekyll and Hyde, a fiery-eyed Hound of the Baskervilles, and a subdued, laconic Frankenstein Monster.

The same year, at Halloween, after intensive lobbying by the Karloff, Lugosi and Chaney estates, the American Postal Service issued a heavily promoted Classic Movie Monsters series featuring Universal Pictures’ family of creatures: Lon Chaney’s Phantom, Chaney Jr.’s Wolfman, Lugosi’s Dracula, and Boris Karloff on two stamps: The Mummy and Frankenstein.

Thomas Blackshear II provided excellent portraits of the characters, notably a baleful, lizard-lidded Karloff Frankenstein, though monster fans, understandably, had hoped for paintings by the legendary Famous Monsters cover artist, Basil Gogos.

The USPS distributed thousands of promotional kits to schools. “We are using the fun of these 'monsters' to get kids interested in collecting stamps," said Azeezaly Jaffer, manager of Stamp Services. “The subject matter of these kid-appealing stamps offers employees the opportunity to promote the hobby.”

The USPS would use The Monster again, in February 2003, this time a closely cropped photograph of Karloff in mid-transformation at the hands of Jack Pierce. The picture served as the “Makeup” entry in a series called American Filmmaking: Behind The Scenes.

Date unknown, a curious Hollywood Horror Classic set was issued by the West African Republic of Sierra Leone, with art by American painter Zina Saunders. The collection includes Charles Laughton’s Dr. Moreau and Lionel Atwill from The Mystery of the Wax Museum, along with the familiar Universal monsters, and features the world’s first Bride of Frankenstein stamp. Karloff appears in a scene from Son of Frankenstein.

The new stamp set, coming June 10 from the Royal Mail, honors popular British films, notably the three Hammer Film lynchpins, Curse of Frankenstein, (Horror of) Dracula, and The Mummy. Much has been printed in the UK about Christopher Lee, featured on all three stamps, becoming the first living non-royal to be featured on a British stamp. In a statement published in the Telegraph, Lee says “I suppose its an honour. Her Majesty is rather more recognisable than me, though. In all but one of the stamps I have seen I have my head in bandages. It’s probably a mercy.”

Interestingly, the other stamps in the Film set honor the bawdy Carry On Series, including their Hammer Film spoof Carry On Screaming.

The stamp design is a bit awkward, using horizontal film posters with the Queen’s cameo and postage overlaid and competing with the already busy images. Nevertheless, it’s amusing to see the Queen’s profile sharing space with the once critically reviled Hammer horrors, and Screaming’s pneumatic Fenella Fielding.

Closeups of the British 1997 Tales of Terror series.

USPS pages for the 1997 Classic Movie Monsters series, and 2003 Filmmaking: Behind the Scenes.

A fascinating page of Dracula stamps from around the world, including a full sheet of the Sierra Leone Hollywood Horror Classics series.

Two wonderful blogs: Literary Stamps, and Fantastisk Filateli.

Tagged!

After nine months of blogging unscathed, I’ve been tagged, dammit, for a meme (rhymes with “mean”), a fancy word for “Tag, you’re it!”.

I am usually wary of these things. The word “viral” puts me in mind of Nigerian money scams, but I overcame my apprehension considering that I was tagged by the inestimable Richard Harland Smith of Movie Morlocks, and the great company I fell in with: My fellow tagees are Kimberly Lindbergs of Cinebeats, Final Girl Stacie Ponder, Video WatchDog Tim Lucas, and Marty McKee of Johnny LaRue’s Crane Shot.

The challenge posed is as follows:

1) Pick up the nearest book.

2) Open to page 123.

3) Locate the fifth sentence.

4) Post the next three sentences on your blog and in so doing...

5) Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

I was game. And I was about to enter the Twilight Zone…

Sitting at the computer, the books immediately at hand are those I use as reference for my blog. The one on top of the pile, currently, was Master Movie Monsters, from 1965, a lightweight celebration of classic horrors, by Brad Steiger. Unfortunately, Mr. Steiger ran out of things to say ten pages short of the magic 123 number, so I moved to the next book, which was Focus on the Horror Film, a longtime favorite of mine, a collection of serious articles on horror films, published in 1972. The cover features an Oliver Reed Werewolf, Lugosi’s Dracula, and The Monster and The Bride holding hands.

I flipped to page 123, counted down and read the three target sentences. I was knocked for a loop. The passage dealt with Hammer’s The Mummy, describing Christopher Lee’s formidable creature as a hollow crust, dusty and cratered with gunshot wounds, comparing it with Mary Shelley’s description of a “degraded and wasted” monster.

For all the randomness of the exercise, the sentences I landed on were perfectly appropriate for my Frankencentric blog!

Delighted, I roughed out my post, set it aside to be polished later, fired off 5 invitations as prescribed, and I turned in. 

Back online Friday afternoon, prior to posting my contribution, I clicked through the links on my menu, landing on a daily favorite of mine, Arbogast On Film, one of the blogs I had tagged. And there, somebody pinch me, was Arbo’s meme entry… from Focus on the Horror Film!

I don’t know what the chances are that both Arbo and I would have the same out of print, relatively obscure, thirty-six year old book within immediate reach. I contemplated probabilities, fate, happenstance and telepathy. I am not normally paranoid, but I checked for hidden microphones.

I had to rewrite my post. This time, I went to another table piled with books waiting to be read or re-read. The book on top was from the second category. I regularly pick books off my shelves to revisit. They are always somehow different each time around.

The book is True History of the Kelly Gang, by Peter Carey, one of the most gripping novels I have ever read, a literary tour-de-force told in the legendary Australian outlaw hero’s “voice”.

Based on a famous letter written by Ned Kelly himself, Carey uses its rythms, its archaic expressions and peculiar writing style devoid of punctuation, save for periods. The words rush together, breathlessly. Seems every sentence in the book is supercharged. Here’s the passage dictated by the meme:

Bill Frost has carked it he said he has bled himself to death.

Now it is many years later I feel great pity for the boy who so readily believed this barefaced lie I stand above him and gaze down like the dead look down from heaven.

The traps is out for you sonny Jim.

There. Now I have to read the book again, like right now.

As per instructions, I tagged, in turn, five other bloggers. I largely shied away from horror blogs (I couldn’t take anyone else quoting from Focus on The Horror Film!) and tried to make my list as eclectic as possible. I came up with the aforementioned (and decidedly troublesome) Arbogast on Film, whose blog — warning! — may prove to be addictive; Max Cheney of The Drunken Severed Head whose blog — warning! — may cause coffee to shoot out of your nostrils; Rob Kelly, who should be posting on any one of his countless comics-oriented blogs, probably Hey Kids Comics! or maybe All in Black & White for 75 Cents; Thom Ryan, the formidable film spelunker at Film of the Year; and Joe Thompson, an expert and enthusiast of rolling stock, I kid you not, holding forth at The Pneumatic Rolling-Sphere Carrier Delusion.

I’ll be clicking through all the links peppered throughout this post to see what everyone is reading.

Frankensteinian : Jonathan Brewster

Can you name the actor with the stitched-up face?

In Joseph Kesselring’s play, Arsenic and Old Lace, killer Jonathan Brewster returns to his childhood home in Brooklyn where he plans to lay low for a while. The cops are looking all over for him on account of twelve murders (thirteen if you count the one in South Bend who “wouldn't have died of pneumonia if I hadn't shot him!”). Now he’s stuck with Mr. Spinalzo, a cumbersome corpse that he needs to unload, and there’s also the matter of his plastic surgeon pal, Dr. Einstein, fixing his face. The last time Jonathan needed a new mug, the inebriated Einstein had just seen “that movie” and made him look like Boris Karloff!

In 1941, the line, “He looks like Boris Karloff!” brought the house down every night at the Fulton Theater in New York. No wonder. It was a bold self-referential joke. The man who looked like Boris Karloff was, in fact, played by Boris Karloff!

A masterpiece of jet-black humor, Arsenic and Old Lace was a Broadway sensation. When Frank Capra shot his very faithful film adaptation, the same year the play opened, principals Jean Adair and Josephine Hunt, as the cuddly but murderous spinster aunts, and John Alexander, as the comically insane Teddy “Roosevelt” Brewster, took a four week stage break to appear in the film.

Ever a trooper, Boris Karloff stayed back in New York to preserve the hit play’s marquee value.

The film part of Jonathan Brewster went to Canadian-born actor Raymond Massey, whose angular, Lincolnian features suited the sinister role to perfection.

The “looks like Karloff” line being so important, the filmmakers took steps to make it relevant no matter who played the part. On stage, Karloff appeared without special makeup, relying on his frowning, bushy black eyebrows to convey menace, and body language to evoke his famous film role. In the movie adaptation, Massey was given a pasty complexion and a network of face stitches, making the Monster connection obvious.

It’s a shame that Karloff did not get to immortalize his Jonathan Brewster performance on film when it was fresh, especially considering that Capra's film was held back and unreleased until 1944, after the play had ended its run. Karloff went on to appear in three different TV adaptations of Arsenic and Old Lace, in 1949, 1955, and 1962.

The play, a real gem and a true classic, has been in continuous revival for over sixty years, with Jonathan Brewster as the plum and pivotal villain part. Even Bela Lugosi essayed the role in a late forties theatrical version.

And the picture at the top of this post? It's from a 1969 ABC Movie of the Week adaptation, and that’s Fred Gwynne, late of The Munsters, as the malevolent Jonathan, in makeup created by Dick Smith. I haven’t seen this version, sometimes chided for its minor but unnecessary updates and tweaks. I just hope they didn’t change that famous line to “He looks like Herman Munster!”.

See the amusing original trailer for the 1944 film. “Raymond Massey… makes Frankenstein look like a glamour boy!”

A New York Times Hirschfeld caricature of the original 1941 cast.

Jack Pierce Birthday

Glenn Strange gets a fresh coat of paint as he is being transformed into the Frankenstein Monster by makeup genius Jack Pierce.

On this day, May 5^th, in 1889, Jack Pierce was born. A Greek immigrant in America, he was a baseball player, a silent movie actor and stuntman, and eventually, a makeup artist. Becoming Head of Universal’s Makeup Department at a time of unparalleled effervescence, Pierce created the wolfmen, the living mummies and all the memorable movie monsters — including a certain Bride — we have come to regard as the classics. The crowning achievement, of course, was his brilliant design for the monster of Frankenstein.

In the early days before modern movie cosmetics and lightweight foam appliances, Pierce painstakingly built up his remarkable creations with wax, cotton, greasepaints and crude chemicals. In 1935, he designed an early reusable “appliance”, casting The Monster’s towering forehead in rubber.

Despite his years of service and his incalculable contributions, Pierce was summarily let go in a management shuffle at Universal in 1947. He continued working as a freelancer for movies and TV. A legend today, he died in relative obscurity, in 1968.

See my previous post about Jack Pierce creating the Frankenstein Monster, and a post about the "lost" Karloff Frankenstein.

Jack Pierce on Wikipedia, featuring links to interesting sites.

Thanks, Max!

The Covers of Frankenstein : Fate No. 498

A ghostly Frankenstein Monster face hovers amidst lightning over its bookish creator on the September 1991 cover of Fate magazine.

The painting, by N. Taylor Blanchard, is serviceable, its narrative clear enough, though The Monster’s appearance is distinctly Hollywoodian rather than literary, and the woman looks absolutely nothing like Mary Shelley.

The accompanying article, Mother of Frankenstein, ruminated on whether psychic powers led to the writing of Mary Shelley’s "horror classic". The author, Pauline Saltzman, was a contributor to Fate magazine for over forty years.

Still published today, Fate, a magazine devoted to paranormal phenomena, was first launched in 1948 under the direction of Curtis Fuller and Amazing Stories editor Ray Palmer. Its famous and wildly successful first issue featured a cover article by Kenneth Arnold, the man who coined the expression “flying saucers”.

In January 1962, the magazine carried another Frankenstein-themed article called “The Legend of the Golem: The First Frankenstein”, written by Ted Lowell.

Fate magazine website.

A gallery of all the Fate magazine covers.