Dick Briefer Frankenstein Sketch

Here’s an unusual find: A very different Frankenstein drawing by the great Dick Briefer (1915-1980).

Briefer, of course, is celebrated for his Frankenstein comics and the two opposite styles he brought to his characterizations. With Prize Comics, in 1940, Briefer introduced a horrific Frankenstein Monster with a split lip, a gruesome scar down the middle of his face and a murderous disposition. In 1945, Briefer redesigned his Frankenstein as a humorous character with a misplaced nose and a heart of gold.

The drawing above, date unknown, turned up at auction recently. It’s a relatively small piece, beautifully done in dry brush and gouache. If you look closely, you can see penciling around the neck bolts.

Considering the extreme interpretations of The Monster that Briefer is justifiably famous for, it’s fascinating to see his take on a straight-up, classic movie-style Frankenstein.

Related:
Dick Briefer’s Frankenstein
Frankenstein vs. the Prize Comics Superheroes
Briefer’s Frankenstein Revisited
Dick Briefer Frankenstein Links

Seven Days to Rondo

This blog has been nominated for 2 Rondo Awards “recognizing the best in monster research, creativity and film preservation”. Frankensteinia is up for BEST HORROR BLOG, and our Boris Karloff Blogathon is up for BEST FAN EVENT. Voting is open to all, but hurry, voting closes on April 3.

I need to send a heartfelt, somewhat boggled and definitely blushing Thank You to the Mysterious Arbogast of Arbogast on Film and Mighty Tim Lucas of Video WatchBlog, who have boldly endorsed Frankensteinia. Click the links, see what they say!

There’s only one week to go until the Rondo Awards are announced. Click HERE and VOTE NOW! The ballot is huge, but you can vote for as many or as few categories as you’re comfortable with. If you wish to support Frankensteinia, please vote for Category 15: Best Blog, Frankensteinia and Category 17: Best Fan Event, Boris Karloff Blogathon.

Thank you for your kind consideration.

PS: I participated in Mad Max Cheney’s Q&A with Rondo nominees. Great company and silly fun! Check it out, on The Drunken Severed Head.

And special thanks to Greg Ferrara of the fabulous Cinema Styles for his support and the image of me with a Frankenstein forehead.

The Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards Ballot.

Porky's Road Race

Karloff’s Frankenstein Monster was an instant favorite with animators, appearing in droll cameos or as the story’s main menace in numerous cartoons throughout the Thirties and Forties. Karloff himself was also featured in a few cartoons, usually caricatured in gaunt deadpan. With Porky’s Road Race, in 1937, both The Monster and the celebrated actor were merged into one villainous, flat-headed character named “Borax Karoff”.

The simple story has Porky Pig driving his tiny roadster in a big race against Hollywood movie stars the likes of W.C.Fields, Laurel and Hardy, and John Barrymore. Charlie Chaplin appears wielding wrenches, Modern Times-style, and Charles Laughton is portrayed as Mutiny on the Bounty’s Captain Bligh, otherwise, most of the famous faces here are mostly forgotten today. George Arliss, anyone?

Borax Karoff is prominently featured, and he is the best-realized character in the piece with his elongated jaw, sawed-off head and Frankenstein bangs, unibrow and raccoon eyes. Borax drives a souped-up, 30-foot long, finned and streamlined speedster — Number 13, of course — with a death’s head hood ornament. He throws tacks, grease, glue and a torpedo at the competition to take the lead. On the home stretch, with every one else sidelined, Porky and Boris sprint for the finish line. Guess how it ends.

Comedy-wise, there’s not a lot going on here. There’s none of the wild creativity that we usually associate with the famous Warner Brothers “Termite Terrace” artists. This cartoon relies entirely on its star cameos for laughs that, I suspect, weren’t very loud even in 1937.

The seven-minute short was animated by Bob Bentley and Joe D’Igalo, under the direction of Frank Tashlin. Writer Allen Rose’s credits include Man of Tin, a 1940 cartoon featuring a Frankensteinian mad scientist and his robot creation.

Porky’s Road Race is distinguished for being voice master Mel Blanc’s first picture, providing Porky’s hiccups (and, I’m guessing, the “putt putt” sound of squirting oil cans). Blanc, incredibly, would go on to voice over one thousand cartoons! Borax Karoff’s sinister cackles were recorded by Billy Bletcher, a character actor and frequent cartoon voice artist. Bletcher, whose career spanned over fifty years, may be best remembered as the mad lab hunchback assistant “Gorzo” in the bizarre science fiction serial The Lost City (1935).

Porky’s Road Race is currently online here.

Related:
More vintage cartoons:
Porky’s Movie Mystery
Frankenstein’s Hollywood Capers
Frankenstein Meets Mickey Mouse
The Snow Man

The Covers of Frankenstein : Famous Monsters, No. 140

A very green Glenn Strange graces the cover of Famous Monsters No. 140, from January 1978.

After twenty years, the popularity of the classic movie monsters that had been the cornerstone of Famous Monsters had waned. Slasher films, never FM’s cup of tea, were entering their golden age and within a year, Fangoria would become the gore go-to magazine for contemporary horror film fans. Famous Monsters took a different angle, latching on to the science-fiction boom ignited by Star Wars.

Beginning with issue 137, in 1977, the Star Wars title began appearing in large letters across the top, with the cover logo displaced and eventually shrunken in size to accommodate such titles as Alien, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Battlestar Galactica and Superman in bold letters. Color photos replaced the traditional painted covers and the magazine’s contents were heavy with cost-conscious reprint material. The issue displayed here was a throwback of sorts, despite the giant STAR WARS overtitle, being one of the last to feature FM’s classic cover design and a painted monster in the Gogos style.

Artist Maelo Cintron’s cover was his only contribution to FM. He was a paperback cover artist and had earlier produced two covers for Calvin Beck’s Castle of Frankenstein, including a Frankenstein-themed illustration for CoF no. 19. Cintron would become a regular at Skywald magazines, and is best remembered for his work on the celebrated Human Gargoyles series he co-created with editor and writer Alan Hewetson.

After Frankenstein

Once they were done shooting Frankenstein, in 1910, the film’s three principals, Augustus Phillips (Frankenstein), Mary Fuller (Fiancée) and Charles Ogle (Monster), would go on to spend most of their film careers with the Edison Company, their paths crisscrossing through the years. As an example, a newspaper item in The Reading Eagle for August 27, 1913, listing Edison films released that week, shows Mary Fuller starring in Who Will Marry Mary?, while Augustus Phillips and Charles Ogle were reunited in a two-reeler whodunit, The Mystery of West Sedgwick.

In those early days of the American movie star system, Edison targeted newspapers with short fluff pieces about their main performers, with an inevitable plug for the studio carefully squeezed in. Articles about Phillips and Ogle read as almost interchangeable. An April 1913 item about Augustus Phillips called Takes Life Easy; Always Content says, “No one who see the films with the ring around the ‘E’ (the Edison logo) can forget Phillips, for he is always starring in some big picture in some new character”. He is reported to be “as pleasant to talk with as he is to look at… a contended man, pleased with his surroundings and at ease with the world.” Of his films, “There is no need to name pictures in which he has and is appearing. The list would fill a book. Besides, every one knows, anyway.”

A very similar item about Charles Ogle appeared in March 1914.

Under the title You Can Always Bank On Seeing Him In Pictures, we are told that “Nearly all the best Edison pictures seem to include Charles Ogle in some role or other. He is a big fellow, with a kindly eye and a ready, sympathetic smile. He makes friends everywhere.” Of the parts he plays, “… you will often see him in some character which seems to require a lot of milk of human kindness to make it convincing.”

Mary Fuller, by the mid-1910s, had become Edison’s top leading lady and a movie star of the first magnitude. In May, 1915, The Pittsburgh Press ran a series of articles purportedly written by Fuller herself. The pieces are nicely written and Fuller was an experienced writer of film scripts, six of which were produced.

In a item called Star Tells Thrills of Initial Appearance in Screen Production, Fuller remembered sitting in an audience and seeing herself onscreen for the first time. “Could that little figure flit-flit-flitting across the white sheet in that intense black and white be myself?” Overcoming “the feeling of strangeness” at seeing herself, she “began critically to watch the pictures… and made mental notes of how to cure the defects.”

In time, Mary writes, “my dreams were gradually realized. I was ‘featured’ and finally ‘starred’ in the movies. I did not fully realize the last happy state until one day I passed a theater where one of my films was being shown. The front of the place was plastered with my name, with my photos and with lithographs of me. Then I realized that, in a measure, I had really ‘arrived’. It’s a delightful feeling and sends a lovely little shiver all over you. And the pleasure never palls.”

There is no record of the actors ever mentioning the early Frankenstein. Back in 1910, it had been just another gig for the Edison trio, just another film in an endless series churned out by the film factory. Surely, they must have been aware of Whale’s Frankenstein, a box-office sensation in 1931. Perhaps then, they reminisced about those long-ago days on the rooftop sets, open to sunlight, out on Decatur Avenue in The Bronx, when they had made the first Frankenstein movie, but there were no interviews given, no recollections recorded.

Charles Ogle passed away in 1940, Augusts Phillips in 1944. Writer-director J. Searle Dawley died in 1949. By then, Universal’s Frankenstein films were known the world over, but the Edison original had spiraled into obscurity.

Mary Fuller lived until 1973. Photos from the Edison Frankenstein had been rediscovered ten years earlier — the film was still considered lost — but Mary Fuller was forgotten, never to tell her story. She had lived a troubled, secluded life. When she passed away, she had been institutionalized for a quarter of a century and there was no family, nobody left to claim her body. Once a world-famous movie star, she was laid to rest in an unmarked grave. The last living witness to the Edison Frankenstein, forever as silent as her screen image, was gone.

Related:
All posts about the Edison Frankenstein

A Weird, Fantastic Conception: Edison's Frankenstein in New Zealand

Back when the Edison Frankenstein was released in March 1910, movie theaters had yet to fully come into their own.

Films were mostly played as complements to Vaudeville shows. A typical evening’s entertainment would feature a headliner or two, supported by generous and highly eclectic assortment of acts that could include Chinese acrobats and novelty dancers, magicians and hypnotists, “blackface travesty artists”, boxing exhibitions, comedy sketches, dog acts, warbling soubrettes and, as the newspaper ads of the day would say, “the usual complement of moving pictures”. Titles rarely given, these one-reelers would include travelogues, newsreels, historical reconstructions, slapstick comedies and tearjerking melodramas, all enjoying ephemeral careers as programming would change, on average, twice a week.

An early specialist in film presentations and promotion was John Fuller’s His Majesty Theatre — “The People’s Picture House!” — in Wellington, New Zealand, where Frankenstein was given special attention.

The film was ballyhooed — FRANKENSTEIN! FRANKENSTEIN! FRANKENSTEIN! — in the theater’s large column ad in The Evening Post on opening night, July 6, and an accompanying article on current “amusements” in town singled out the Edison film. “Among the innovations… to be presented to-night” the copy read, “prominence must be given to ‘Frankenstein,’ a picture representation of Mary Shelley’s great novel. The film, an Edison production, is described as a weird and fantastic conception, and marks a further advance in the kinematographer’s art, being quite unlike anything ever shown here before.”

The film program also included a bullfighter drama, a newsboy adventure, a western romance, scenic views of a Danish lake, and “some interesting glimpses of the London Fish Markets”. Perhaps the best-known performer onscreen that evening was André Deed, billed as Foolshead, also known as Cretinetti, in Foolshead’s Unwilling Marriage. The comic, who had started in films with George Méliès, made hundreds of shorts in France and Italy. Competition in town that week included a popular stage presentation of The Manxman, a celebrated vaudevillian trio from Sydney, and a new Max Linder comedy. All houses, including His Majesty’s, announced “new views” of King Edward VII’s funeral.

The next day, July 7, the Evening Post reported on the previous evening’s entertainment at His Majesty’s, expounding on the “magnificent” footage of the King’ funeral and giving Gallaher, the newsboy film, the best review: “Its American swing captured the fancy of the house.” The Fish Market subject was said to be “cleverly descriptive” and the Foolshead short was hailed as “a comic extravagance that is not too absurd to afford a healthy amusement.” Frankenstein was relegated to the last, terse line of the article, “a ‘monster’ series of ‘Frankenstein’ type is not without points of cleverness.”

His Majesty’s Theatre, popularly referred to as “Fuller’s Vaudeville”, was on its last legs when Frankenstein played its weeklong engagement. Declared a fire hazard in November 1911, the theater was torn down and rebuilt to world-class specifications. It survives today as the St. James Theater, a spectacular and busy performance space and the home of the Royal New Zealand Ballet.

The Edison Frankenstein: 100 Years Ago Today

If you’ve never seen it, now’s the time. Here, 100 years to the day after it was first released, is the Edison Frankenstein. Hang in, the picture quality gets better after the first few moments.

As would become usual for a Frankenstein film, The Monster steals the show. Its ingredients mixed in a saucepan, and eerily burned to life in a tub, Charles Ogle shuffles around on big bandaged feet, skulks menacingly, rears up in surprise and strikes hieroglyphic poses. With crooked claw pantomime, he points towards Elizabeth just gone offscreen, then to himself. The Monster demands a mate.

The film is theatrical, you almost expect a curtain to go up and down between tableaux, but the mirror scene is very inventive, characters appearing in the mirror before they step onscreen, and the dissolving reflections are simple, early, but very effective special effects.

Enjoy.

Edison's Frankenstein In The Round

One hundred years ago, the startling Monster in the Kinetograph Frankenstein drew its aesthetic inspiration from theatrical tradition harking all the way back to 1823, when T.P.Cooke first leapt onstage wearing a belted toga, a “counselor’s” wig, and blue greasepaint on his face. Cooke’s imitators and successors copied and perpetuated the look.

By the time Charles Ogle donned the tunic and wig of The Monster at the Edison studios in 1910, he stood in a direct line of shaggy Frankenstein monsters, the image of The Monster in the first half of its performance life, as dominant then as the radically different Pierce and Karloff version has been since 1931.

Charles Ogle’s grimacing Monster is an irresistible inspiration for figure and mask art interpretations. The best of the bunch is William Paquet’s superb sculpt, originally produced as a resin kit by Monstrology Models and reissued in 2009 by Fritz Frising. The figurine is beautifully detailed, with wild crepe hair and realistic drool.

An earlier resin kit produced by Bruce Turner’s Cinema Art Models, captured the Ogle Monster in his trademark hula dancer pose.

A bizarre re-imagining of the Edison Frankenstein was produced by Aztech Toys and issued by Mezco as part of the Silent Screamers series that included the Metropolis Robot, the Golem and Nosferatu, all given an altogether unnecessary makeover.

Finally, a brand-new, one-of piece is the fabulous 100^th Anniversary Tribute Display Mask created by sculptor and makeup artist Tony Pitocco on a special commission from mask expert and collector extraordinaire Bill Luciani. It’s a perfect, stunning likeness of the saucer-eyed Monster, seen here for the first time.

There can be no doubt, Ogle’s Monster will continue to inspire for another hundred years.

Related:
Bill Luciani's 100 Heads of Frankenstein
All posts about Edison's Frankenstein

Repost: The First Frankenstein of the Movies

It was a century ago this week that the above title card first flickered on a screen as the first Frankenstein film unspooled. Click HERE and watch the Edison Frankenstein!

Here’s a repost, with slight tweaks, of my article on the making of, and the principals involved in the Edison Frankenstein. Here is The First Frankenstein of the Movies...

“In making the film, the Edison Company has carefully tried to eliminate all the actually repulsive situations and to concentrate its endeavors upon the mystic and psychological problems that are to be found in this weird tale."

— The Edison Kinetogram, March 1910

The first Frankenstein film was released on March 18, 1910. The image above announces the later release of the film in England.

The 12-minute film was shot in January of 1910 at the Edison studios on Decatur Avenue, in The Bronx, New York. In an era when film were made in just one day, three whole days were lavished on this production, no doubt due to the demands of elaborate makeup and the special effects of the creation and mirror scenes.

Frankenstein was overseen by J. Searle Dawley, serving as producer, writer and director. A former actor, stage manager and vaudevillian, Dawley had been hired by Edwin S. Porter of the Edison Company in 1907, specifically to direct. He would later lay claim to the title of “the first motion picture director” because, until then, “the cameraman was in full charge”. Dawley would direct well over 200 silents, including Rescued from an Eagle's Nest (1908), a thriller famous for its scene of a baby carried aloft by an eagle, and the acting debut of one D.W.Griffith.

The same year he made Frankenstein, Dawley traveled to California as one of the leaders of a movement that would see filmmaking in America switch to the West Coast. In 1917, he became the first secretary, under Alan Dwan, of the newly formed Motion Pictures Directors Association. Dawley quit films in 1927 to work in radio.

In Dawley’s Frankenstein, the scientist literally cooks up his Monster in a boiler-cabinet. A dummy of the Monster, complete with a movable arm, was set afire and the film was reversed so that we see The Monster apparently assemble itself in a cloud of roiling ash and smoke. Frankenstein is overcome with horror and remorse at the sight of his horrible, hairy creation. In the one scene straight out of Mary Shelley’s novel, The Monster appears at the bed curtains to hover balefully over the collapsed Frankenstein.

In the final scene, as he looks at himself in a full-length mirror, The Monster vanishes, but his reflection remains. Frankenstein enters and sees himself as The Monster in the mirror. The image of The Monster dissolves and is replaced by Frankenstein’s reflection. The title card reads: “The creation of an evil mind is overcome by love and disappears¨. The concept of Frankenstein and his Monster as being intimately connected, perhaps even one and the same, has since been explored in countless retellings.

The part of Frankenstein is essayed with gesticulating fervor by Augustus Phillips, an actor whose otherwise unremarkable film career spanned the next ten years. The small part of Elizabeth was secured by Mary Fuller, an actress whose popularity would go on to match that of Lillian Gish or Mary Pickford, albeit briefly. She retired, abruptly, in 1917, and lived the rest of her life as a recluse.

The Monster of the film is played by Charles Ogle, a respected and prolific character actor who would appear in over 300 silents. It is assumed he designed the makeup for The Monster, though helping hands must have been recruited to assemble it. The grimacing Monster has a deformed skull, wild hair, big bandaged feet and hands like dead tree branches. He wears rags slung with ropes.

Frankenstein was just one of thirty films released by the Edison Trust that week. It seems that Frankenstein had the typically short distribution life that most films could hope for back then. Copies were sent through the exhibition circuit and soon returned to the Edison lab and destroyed, their silver content recycled. Cinema art and technology progressed rapidly in those days and, a mere five years later, the theatrics of Frankenstein were already old hat. The film was to be forgotten for half a century.

In 1963, a copy of the March 15, 1910 issue of The Edison Kinetogram trade magazine surfaced with a picture of the Ogle Frankenstein and a synopsis of the film. Among other sources, Famous Monsters of Filmland carried an article about it and, almost overnight, the film became one of the most sought after of all “lost film”. Against all expectations, it did not remain lost for long.

An eccentric collector and archivist, Alois F. Dettlaff, Sr., revealed that he owned a complete print of the now famous film. While some historians are grateful to Dettlaff for preserving the film, there are others who accused him of hoarding an historical artifact. Dettlaff circulated copies with proprietary markings on the screen, and is said to have lobbied the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for an Oscar in recognition of his work saving the film. It was all for nothing. Dettlaff passed away, alone, in 2005, and since then the film has become an ubiquitous download on Internet film sites.

The film is usually referred to as “The Edison Frankenstein”, but the real-life scientist and experimenter, Thomas Edison, only ushered the fictional scientist, Frankenstein, into the world of films in his remote capacity as president of the Edison Kinetograph Company. There is no record of Edison himself mentioning the film or, for that matter, even seeing it, from among the veritable torrent of product his company churned out every week.

Charles Ogle is now remembered as the first Frankenstein Monster of the Movies. Humorously, perhaps, the actor who made a his career in silent films lends his name to the Ogle Awards for Best Fantasy/Horror Audio Production of the Year, sponsored by the American Society for Science Fiction Audio.

Related:
Silent Frankensteins
The Art of Frankenstein: Jeff Heermann
The Titles of Frankenstein

View or download the film on Archive.org.

Review and analysis of the film on And You Call Yourself a Scientist, and a good, in-depth article on Film Buff On Line.

The Wikipedia page for the film carries the plot writeup from the original Edison Kinetogram.

Obituary of Alois Dettlaff on Film Buff On Line.

Horror Stalks The Newsstand

The nice people over at SFX magazine have graced me with a copy of their new Horror Special, and I certainly don’t mind giving them a plug here, considering how much I enjoyed the issue.

There’s an amazing amount of material in here, profusely illustrated, and I love how vintage horror films get their dues along with the contemporary fare. For instance, an interview with makeup man Rick Baker on the new Wolfman (with stunning photos) segues into an article about the 1941 original. The vintage stuff includes a look back at the original Wicker Man, the so-called “blaxploitation” horror films of the Seventies, a history of Spanish fright films, and a fascinating look at lost silents.

Ultimately, what I liked best was the Brit-centric material that never gets much attention on this side of the Atlantic: There’s a review of all 74 notorious “video nasties”, and a great article about the legendary Pan Book of Horror series.

And finally, a Frankenstein moment: The news section of the issue previews an upcoming book, Hammer Films: The Unsung Heroes, by Wayne Kinsey…

The picture here reveals the prop-head trick behind Peter Cushing’s harrowing brain-drill operation in Frankenstein Must be Destroyed. It’s just one of the rarely or never-before-seen pictures to be collected in the new Hammer book, coming from Tomahawk Press.

Kudos to editor Ian Berriman for a seriously good job. Makes you wish that the publishers at SFX would turn their Horror Special into a regular, ongoing magazine.

See a complete and very impressive list of contents on the SFX website.

Frankenstein in Australia

One of the earliest caricatures inspired by James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) appeared in the The Sydney Mail, May 18, 1932, accompanying a review of the film.

At the top, perfect likenesses of Colin Clive in his laboratory smock and his scruffy assistant, Dwight Frye, debate Edward van Sloan as they hover over the shrouded shape of the reclined Monster. Down the side we see the fateful windmill, bloodhounds on the trail and knocked-out victims strewn about. The main caricature features a deadpan Monster throttling Clive and van Sloan.

Cartoonist Harry Julius (1885-1938) was a major Australian artist and a pioneer in multiple fields. A noted editorial cartoonist, he also ran an early and very innovative advertising agency, he introduced comics to Australian newspapers, and he is celebrated as the first Australian film animator. His Cartoons of the Moment series of one-reelers popular through the First World War years would often start with Julius himself seen sketching outdoors or working in his book-cluttered office. Using stop-motion photography and animated paper cutouts, the one-reeler would follow the cartoonist’s pixilated hand as the satirical cartoon came together from scratch to its final, punchline caption.

Julius’ first love was theatrical cartooning, and the Frankenstein piece is done in the genre’s narrative style, with scenes and multiple characters.

The accompanying review of the film, by Iris Norton Dexter, is also a standout, but for vastly different reasons. Ms Dexter demolishes Frankenstein as “slapstick drama”, at best “an old-fashioned thriller” and a “mildly interesting” film that cannot hold its own next to the “convincing thing” that was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. “Universal,” she writes, “still refuses to accept Paramount’s idea of casting good, reliable actors in pictures of the thriller and shriekie type.”

Frankenstein, like its companion piece Dracula, we are told, is “a mere mechanical attempt to horrify, without the added conviction of reasonable acting, construction, and treatment”. Colin Clive is dismissed as “a very homely and affected actor, stiffly incapable of capturing the true feelings of Frankenstein, the scientist.” Mae Clarke is “out of place” in the film, given “nothing to do save hammer on doors” and plead with her fiancée “to desist from his godless practices.” John Boles “has even less to do”.

Of Boris Karloff, while allowing that he makes “a terrifying monster”, Ms Dexter states that he is an actor “whose ugliness has doomed him to play Lon Chaney roles”.

Not entirely immune to Frankenstein’s rhythm, Ms Dexter writes, “The film is not without its thrilling moments of a ghastly nature”, singling out the creation scene — “the final test” where The Monster comes “to awful soulless life” — and the film’s conclusion.

“Death is his hobby, but his maker refuses to kill him… however, the monster escapes, and death goes with him across the countryside”, Dexter writes. Unconcerned with spoilers, she opines: “The monster’s final capture and cremation in a burning mill are probably the most thrilling scenes in the picture, mainly because the element of chase is at least real and natural. A chase of this kind could happen anywhere, and, since the monster is unseen for the greater part, those scenes become genuine enough for the easily-satisfied audience”.

Concluding, Ms Dexter states that Universal is preparing “many more pictures of this type… Those ready for release include “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Suicide Club,” with six others of similar feeling to follow.”

Note that Murders in the Rue Morgue was already screening in America, but The Suicide Club, alternately announced as a vehicle for Lugosi or Karloff, was never filmed.

Upon its release, reviews of James Whale’s Frankenstein were generally favorable and occasionally enthusiastic, though often weighted with snooty sarcasm, as if a horror film, no matter how well done, could not possibly deserve the respect and attention given “serious” dramas. That being said, few reviewers were as boldly dismissive as Iris Norton Dexter. In a later, second phase of her career, Ms Dexter, now writing as Iris Chapman Aria, was celebrated as a reporter and as one of Australia’s preeminent correspondents during World War II.

A number of Harry Julius’ fascinating Cartoons of the Moment animated films are posted on the Australian Screen website.

The Covers of Frankenstein : The Bride Novelized

In a highly stylized, color-drenched illustration — artist unfortunately unidentified — the Monster and his Betrothed hold hands on the cover of the Bride of Frankenstein novelization from 1936. Coincidentally, no doubt, the Bride’s hair is red, as was Elsa Lanchester’s.

Michael Egremont was the one-time-only pen name of Michael Harrison (born Maurice Desmond Rohan, 1907-1991), then in the early stages of a long and distinguished writing career. Harrison served with British Intelligence during World War II and went on to a wide variety jobs, including stints as a journalist, an editor, an advertising director, a market research executive and an industrial consultant. In the Fifties, he established himself as a major authority on Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, notably with the essential In the Footsteps of Sherlock Holmes (1958). Harrison also wrote seven new Holmes novels, as well as new adventures of Poe’s consulting detective, Auguste Dupin.

The Bride novelization was originally published as a Queensway Edition of The Readers Library Publishing Company of London on January First, 1936. The book today is scarce, with a high quality copy going for close to a thousand dollars. Add the very rare dust jacket seen here and the book more than triples in value.

An American edition was published in 1976 by the specialty house, Bookfinger. Signing a copy, Harrison once referred to his early film novel as a “very odd literary curiosity”.

Another Bride of Frankenstein novelization, this one by Ramsey Campbell writing as “Carl Dreadstone”, was published in 1977 as part of The Universal Horror Library from Berkley Medallion.

Gruesomestein's Monsters

Gruesomestein’s Monsters was a series concept developed through the early part of the last decade for Toronto-based Nelvana studios. Created, written, produced and directed — with voice acting thrown in — by Mark Ackland and Riccardo Durante, the project yielded six 5-minute Flash animation shorts that ran as part of the Fun Pack program on the Canadian kids network YTV. One episode, Russell’s Tussle, made the competition list at the Chicago International Children’s Film Festival in 2005.

The show, beautifully designed, drops its outrageous monster characters into whacked out situations. There’s a witch that runs afoul of “Fairy Tale Land” laws — some rule against cooking children — and a Jekyll-Hyde character messes with a bank robber on the lam. There’s an obvious love of classic movie monsters at work in a Teenage Werewolf episode set in the rock n’roll Fifties, and a Yeti story unfolds in “Cushing Falls National Park”, a reference to the early Hammer horror, Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas. A Frankenstein episode, The Worst Date, is done in vintage black and white.

The Worst Date features a mad scientist, a hunchbacked assistant, and a cute Bride character with sutured neck and trademark beehive. When her milquetoast beau comes to the castle to pick her up, he becomes an instant candidate for a one-way brain transplant, for the benefit of a hulking, drooling, comatose Monster with glassy eyes.

Here, for your viewing pleasure, is the Frankenstein episode: The Worst Date.

All six episodes of Gruesomestein’s Monsters are online. The show’s blog archives are loaded with fascinating info, design and production art. I wish they had made more of these.

The Gentlemanly Madness of Lionel Atwill

Lionel Atwill was born in Croyden, England, 125 years ago today, March 1^st 1885.

The British-born actor became a Broadway sensation in 1918, starring in no less than five top productions that year. An April New York Times article, entitled The Rise of Lionel Atwill, stated, “Atwill is riveting his position as one of the most valuable stage importations from England in several seasons.”

Despite his success on stage, often directing and producing in addition to his performing, Atwill abruptly turned his back on New York in 1931. Reprising his part as a lawyer from his last play, Silent Witness, in a 1932 film, he would, from then on, work exclusively in Hollywood. His very next film, Doctor X, introduced him to horror films. He appeared in six horror and mystery titles released in quick succession, literally within a year, outpacing rivals Karloff and Lugosi. Of these, Murders in the Zoo (1933) with its grisly revenge plot, opened notoriously with Atwill sewing a man’s lips together. “You’ll never lie to a friend again," he cackles. "You'll never kiss another man’s wife!”

Paired in three films with the incandescent Fay Wray, their encounter in The Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933) proved the most memorable, captured in warm, two-strip Technicolor, with Wray punching and cracking Atwill’s wax face to reveal the burned monster underneath. Her scream still resonates.

Atwill returned to the genre in 1939, going on to appear in five consecutive Frankenstein films, opposite every actor who played The Monster at Universal: Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney Jr, Bela Lugosi and Glenn Strange.

Uniformed and ramrod-straight, manipulating a monocle and an articulated wooden arm with Teutonic precision, and delivering his lines in machine-gun, clipped tones, Atwill forged one of the most iconic and memorable characters in the Frankenstein film canon as Inspector Krogh in Son of Frankenstein (1939), a part beautifully spoofed 35 years later by Kenneth Mars in Young Frankenstein (1974).

In The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942), Atwill was the mad scientist who catastrophically swapped Ygor’s brain into the Monster’s flat skull, and in Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman (1943), he appeared in a small supporting role as a the Mayor of monster-infested Vasaria. Finally, Atwill returned to his trademark Inspector parts, called Arnz in House of Frankenstein (1944), and Holtz in House of Dracula (1945).

Among his many menace and mystery roles, Atwill played opposite Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes twice, most notably as Professor Moriarty in Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (1943). He specialized, typecast perhaps, as a mad scientist in numerous programmers. As the Frankensteinian Dr. Rigas in Man Made Monster, a sleeper hit in 1941, he turned Lon Chaney Jr’s Lennie-like Dynamo Dan McCormick into a glowing electrical zombie, exclaiming "Of course I'm mad!"

Atwill’s private life would provide newspaper fodder throughout his career, starting with a sensational divorce case in 1925, while at the peak of his Broadway years. In 1930, Atwill married the stunning and very opinionated Louise Cromwell Brooks, a famous socialite, recently divorced from General Douglas McArthur. “I traded four little stars for one big Hollywood star” she quipped. Her Palm Beach lifestyle, her political connections and frequent one-liners made “Mrs. Lionel Atwill” a gossip column favorite.

Movie press agents fed Atwill stories to the papers. A 1934 article boldly credited Atwill as having “discovered” director Joseph Sternberg. In 1936, a plug for the spy drama Till We Meet Again made the papers as “Papa Atwill Stumps Sonny With Monocle”. The item related how Atwill had amused his family by wearing his movie monocle at a family dinner, supposedly prompting his son Walter to ask, “Why is it that in the pictures your monocle always stays on, but at home it always falls in the soup?”

The Atwill’s opulent homes made the news, too. A mansion evaluated at $42,000 burned to the ground in the California fires of October 1935, and coastal storm in December 1936 destroyed two of Atwill’s homes, said to be undermined and sliding into the ocean along with $12,000 worth of antique furniture. The Atwills’ estate in Green Springs, Maryland, where they had married, was burglarized twice in August 1937. The house had served as a honeymoon retreat for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

All the press attention turned sour shortly after the Atwills separated in 1939, the Mrs. retiring to a mansion in Palm Springs. Atwill became the focus of a highly publicized, career-crippling scandal over a Christmas 1940 party held at his Malibu home. Guests, some possibly underaged, were said to have cavorted in the nude on a tiger skin rug while stag movies were screened. In a court appearance, an emphatic Atwill claimed that he was “absolutely not guilty”, resulting in a felony charge for perjury. Then came the tragic news, in 1941, that his 26-year old son, John Arthur, had been killed in action.

Atwill’s perjury case would be dismissed in 1943, after the actor came clean and said he had “lied like a gentleman” to protect his family and friends from embarrassment. The judge recognized that the American censor board, the Hays Office, had restricted the actor’s appearance in films. “It would constitute unusual punishment to continue this situation,” Judge McKay noted, “which would prevent the defendant from earning a living.” But the damage was done, with Atwill already relegated to B-pictures and threadbare serials.

Lionel Atwill remarried in 1944 and fathered a son, Anthony, but the actor’s health declined and he died on April 22, 1946, after a long, debilitating battle with pneumonia. He was 61.

On YouTube: The grisly opening sequence from Murders in the Zoo, the complete Mystery of the Wax Museum, and Atwill in full Mad Doctor mode in Man Made Monster.

Lobby cards: Heritage Auctions.