Frankenstein in Brisbane, Part 4: Commencing To-Day

A grim Monster, a portrait in pencils, dominates the opening day ad for Frankenstein at the Tivoli Theater in Brisbane.

Another striking newspaper ad illustrated by the same artist, Julian Rose, shows Karloff’s Monster glancing back at panicked patrons. The heart pounding blurb reads, “You hate it… fear it… yet it wrings your heart with pity!”. The insurance policy is in effect, that “you may take solace” knowing that your next of kin will collect should the movie scare you to death. There’s no provenance given for this clipping, and there were several Capitol theaters in Australia, all part of the Hoyt’s chain. 

Obviously, Rose used promotional stills as reference. The profile drawing is from a photo of The Monster in the windmill and the standing Monster was posed on the mountain set.

Julian Rose’s precise origins are unclear. His parents, named Reznik or Resnick, also Russianized as Rezhnikoff, came from Odessa and a younger brother, Lou, was born in Sydney. Julian first rose to prominence as a vaudeville performer, sometimes billed as The Singing Cartoonist. He worked under the name Don Julian, no doubt to avoid confusion with a Brooklyn-born Julian Rose, a popular “Hebrew comic” who shuttled regularly between England and Australia.

Affecting a comedic French accent, Rose’s act was described by one reviewer as a “Frenchy artist who does lightning and clever caricatures with crayons, to the patter of wisecracks”. An ad for the Grand Opera House in Wellington, where he shared billing with The Harmonylarity Duo and a team of acrobatic violinists, has Don Julian down as The Continental Cartoonist, adding “He speaks a wee bit of English, yes”.

Rose played Melbourne’s Tivoli — where Frankenstein would open — in 1928 alongside Schistl’s Marionettes (Little People were often billed as “dolls” or “marionettes”) and Joe Termini, The Somnolent Melodist. In 1928, Rose was hired for a two-year, worldwide tour as a supporting act for the great Harry Lauder, Britain’s most famous performer and once the highest-paid entertainer in the world.

Returning to home to Sydney in June 1930, Rose set up Advertising Art Service Ltd., a company that would produce commercial art and display advertising for theatre and film. He would still moonlight, on occasion, as The Singing Cartoonist, at least through the Thirties, though he would devote himself mostly to his Art Agency until the Fifties after which Mr. Rose drops off our radar.

Julian’s brother, Lou, also an artist, worked for Advertising Art Service in the Thirties, later going on to a highly distinguished career serving the Jewish community. In 1973, he designed and sculpted a plaque dedicated to the memory of the murdered Israeli athletes of the Munich Olympics for the Jewish Memorial Center in Canberra.

Julian Rose’s Frankenstein ads suggest that he was hired to provide illustrations promoting the film’s release nation wide. Though his art is often signed, any number of unsigned sketches and eerie silhouettes in newspaper ads could be his work. Furthermore, no posters for Frankenstein’s Australian release have yet surfaced, and one wonders if Rose designed or illustrated any Frankenstein poster art.

We’ll keep an eye out for more Frankenstein art by the remarkable Julian Rose. 

The Capitol Theater ad courtesy of Greggory's Shock Theatre.

With thanks to Robert Kiss for his impeccable and exhaustive research into the life and career of Julian Rose.

Related:
Frankenstein caricature by Australian cartoonist Harry Julius.

Frankenstein in Brisbane, Part 3: The Monster, in Person!

“A stir was caused when the Kiyogle mail train came to a standstill at the South Brisbane Station yesterday, and a man more than 7ft. in height, with his face hideously made up, stepped on to the platform to face a battery of cameras.”

So read a short notice under the title “Giant’s Arrival” in the Brisbane Courier of June 9, 1932. Frankenstein’s Monster had come to town.

The sullen, lanky gentleman in the clunky Monster boots was one Lance Robartson, “6ft. 11in. in his socks”, self-proclaimed Tallest Man in Australia. Reporters dwelled on Mr. Robartson’s difficulties in securing sleeping accommodations, train berths and hotel beds invariably too small and uncomfortable.

Robartson would appear at the posh Carlton Cabaret — “FRANKENSTEIN will be present… A Monster” — on the night before the film’s premiere. Ads promised an “Evening of melody, song, dancing and laughter”, but there is no record of how The Monster worked the room. Did he dance or sing? Was there a skit?

The Courier reported, simply, that “An enjoyable time was held at the Carlton Cabaret on Thursday evening”. A long list of guests was published, local bigwigs no doubt, treated to a dinner party by the Tivoli Theater management, and a note saying that Mr. Robartson would soon entrain for Melbourne. Beyond that, all traces of Mr. Robartson or his stint as a Frankenstein stand-in are lost. As of this writing, all we have are some newspaper ads and an old grainy photograph.

The Carlton Cabaret, adjoining the Carlton Hotel, opened in March of 1930 as “a social rendez-vous” and “a thoroughly modern amusement palace”. It was said to combine the best features of the world’s leading cabarets. Several rooms allowed for all-day operation, serving luncheon, “tea dansant”, dinner and evening entertainment. A ten-piece orchestra, reportedly among the highest paid bands in Australia, occupied “a raised dais of beautiful design” in the large ballroom, its dance floor a sprung and polished surface of redwood. Once an opulent showplace, the Carlton Cabaret was later cut up into smaller venues and finally demolished in the late Eighties.

Next up in this series: Frankenstein Opens!

Frankenstein in Brisbane, Part 2: An Epic of Terror

June, 1932. In the week leading up to the June 10 opening of Frankenstein, the management of Brisbane’s Tivoli theater ramps up the promotion. On Wednesday, June 8, a private screening is held for the press, and this fever-pitch preview ad appears in The Brisbane Courier. Click the image to see it large.

The Chilling Horror… The Icy Mystery Of A Hundred Thrilling Tales Frozen Into An EPIC OF TERROR reads the copy, against an intriguing, featureless outline drawing of The Monster. 
                                                              
Conceived in Madness! He wrecked coffins and stole bodies to make a creature with blotchy face and blackened lips… He packed the brain of a criminal into its misshapen head…

Ballyhoo was the art of exaggeration, over the top was the only way to go, and a film as exciting and unusual as Frankenstein invited extravagant hype, but few ads we’ve seen were as delirious as this one. Witness this existential description of the film’s extraordinary Monster…

Out of the void of the Infinite it came, a snarling monster that sweated death and madness.

And the Tivoli’s PR people weren’t done yet! Next up in the series: The Monster, in Person!

Related:
Frankenstein in Brisbane, Part 1: Free Insurance!

Frankenstein in Brisbane, Part 1: Free Insurance!

The Monster peers through a window at Elizabeth draped across the bed in a faint. The image evokes the scene where Boris Karloff’s Monster confronts Mae Clarke on her wedding day, staged by director James Whale in emulation of the Fuseli painting called The Nightmare.

Summer of ’32, Frankenstein, already a massive hit, was deploying to cinemas in America and all around the world. In Australia, the highly anticipated film demolished house records in Sydney and Perth. Booked into Brisbane for a June 10 premiere, the management of the Tivoli theatre turned on the ballyhoo. As a measure of the film’s expected success, a newspaper ad published on Tuesday, June 7, announces that “sessions” will begin at 9 AM, effectively adding a couple of lucrative showings to the day’s schedule.

Just so there was no doubt about the film’s shocks, “trained nurses”— as opposed, one imagines, to those unreliable, unskilled ones — are promised to be in attendance throughout the film’s run. And should nurses fail to save you, free insurance, taken out with Lloyd’s of London, guaranteed ₤1000 cash paid out to next of kin if you were the first patron to die “caused by, and during, the screening of ‘Frankenstein’.” Fortunately, there is no record of anyone having collected.

All that’s missing now is for the Frankenstein Monster himself to show up. But what’s that “Special Frankenstein Night” coming up at the Carlton Cabaret two days hence? Stick around and find out as the Frankenstein in Brisbane series continues through the coming week.

Related:
Frankenstein in Australia
Frankenstein in Sydney
Uncanny Creature
A Premiere in Perth

Countdown to Fantasia

Fantasia, the largest genre film festival in North America, swings into action this week, in Montréal. Running from July 19 to August 9 — three weeks! — the 16th annual edition will feature over 160 films, cutting edge to classic revival, with guests, panels, master classes and special events throughout. This year, as a measure of the festival’s international influence and reputation, Fantasia has grown to include a new Film Market for industry agents and producers. 

Films on a Frankensteinian theme include Eron Sheean’s Errors of the Human Body, describes as “an unsettling, stylistically bold look at the personal and ethical horrors of modern genetic engineering”, and Allison Defren’s The Mechanical Bride, a disturbing documentary exploring the obsessions of “individuals of all ages and origins who feel unconditional love for, and are physically attracted to, mechanical women”. 

On a lighter note, shades of Robocop and The Vindicator, there’s Steven Kostanski’s Manborg, a new movie that plays like a drive-in/grindhouse sci-fi B-movie from the seventies.

Among the original programming, we note Origins of The Dark Knight, a lecture and screening hosted by Philippe Spurrell and Christian Major that tracks early influences for Bob Kane’s Batman, including the 1931 film The Reckoner (aka The Public Defender), starring Richard Dix as a millionaire playboy who moonlights as a mysterious avenger, assisted by Boris Karloff as the Alfred-like character, “The Professor”. Then there’s If They Came from Within, the fun, Alternative History of Canadian Horror, which I previously posted about here.

Check out the eye-popping Fantasia website, loaded with info and film trailers!

Foley's Frankenstein

A makeup mishap on the dungeon set — a fallen Frankenstein face — and director James Whale, carefully coiffed and posing with a cigar, calls for Jack Pierce who flies into the scene at full clip, lugging his makeup kit and a hammer. Pierce’s likeness, in profile, is dead on.

This Jack Foley cartoon is undated and there is no record of it being published, but it is believed to be contemporary to the picture, circa 1931 or 1932. Note, at the center of the image, the distinctive Western Electric microphone used on Frankenstein (previous discussed here).

A photograph of the cartoon turned up in Jack Pierce’s scrapbook, sold in 2009 by the Heritage Auctions house. Seen here is a another copy — perhaps the original art? —signed in the lower left corner to Boris Karloff — the dedication too faint to read — by Jack Pierce. The two men were lifelong friends and mutual admirers.

In the late Thirties and into the Forties, Jack Foley (1891-1967) wrote and illustrated humorous articles for Universal-International’s in-house Studio News magazine, but cartooning was just a sideline for him. Moving from his native New York to California in 1914, Foley had broken into films as a jack of all trades, serving as stuntman, location scout, script writer and director — he also moonlighted as playwright and newspaper writer — but he would find his true calling when sound came to motion pictures. 

Early microphones were attuned to actor’s voices and it was Foley who developed a method of adding the necessary ambient sounds to filmed scenes. 

Working on a soundstage, surrounded with props, Foley added the tinkling of china, creaking furniture, slamming doors and all sorts of noise and sound effects to movies. Practicing and perfecting his art over the next 30 years, Foley claimed he walked 5000 miles without going anywhere, simulating footsteps. On his last film, Spartacus (1960), Foley provided the sound of slaves marching in leg chains by jiggling a bunch of keys. His contribution to motion pictures was so important that sound effect stages today are called Foley Stages, and its attendant technicians are Foley Artists and Foley Editors.

The Story of Jack Foley, on Filmsound.org.

The Jack Foley Stage at Universal.

The Posters of Frankenstein : La Fiancée de Frankenstein

After all these years, there are still wonderful images that surface for us to marvel at. Currently on offer from Heritage Auctions is this stunning poster announcing a January 1936 showing of La Fiancée de Frankenstein.

The unusual layout features colorized photographs. The artist went overboard with Boris Karloff’s Monster done up with green skin, yellow highlights, red eyes and rouged cheeks. Ernest Thesiger’s Dr. Pretorius is more controlled, with champagne hair, and Elsa Lanchester’s Bride is beautifully rendered, with blonde hairstreaks.

The poster, its designer unfortunately unidentified, is another beautiful print by Belgian lithographer L. F. De Vos & Cie whose artist in the mid-30s included a moonlighting René Magritte, no less. We’ll never know if he worked on a Frankenstein poster but, hey, wouldn’t that be something if he did?

Related:
Belgian poster for Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man

Frankenweenie On Tour

In 1984, Disney shelved the live action short Frankenweenie as too scary, and fired its young director, Tim Burton. 28 years later, studio and director are on the same page and the film, retooled as a big budget stop-motion feature, is coming to theaters in October. A new full-length trailer premiered last week.

Sparky, the Frankenstein dog, and his poodle Bride are back, along with new characters including a boy with a signature flattop, and Edgar, a creepy Weird-Oh-style hunchback. Voice actors include Winona Ryder, Martin Landau, Catherine O'Hara, and Christopher Lee does cameo as Dracula.

Also of interest is The Art of Frankenweenie, a very comprehensive exhibition of the film’s designs, puppets and sets that opened in Barcelona in June and will tour nine major cities throughout the year. Here’s a trailer for the exhibition.