Frankenstein's Windmill

A 1940 photo shows the Van de Kamp Dutch Bakery sitting at the corner of Ivar and Yucca in Los Angeles. That’s the Knickerbocker Hotel across the street, once a Hollywood hot spot that fell on hard times before being saved and converted into housing for senior citizens.

In the Spring of 1931, working with writer Garrett Fort, Robert Florey — the first director attached to Universal’s Frankenstein — wrote a script that would serve as a template for the shooting script reworked under James Whale, who took over the project in June. Among Florey’s surviving contributions were the crucial brain switch and the atmospheric denouement in an old windmill where The Monster dragged its creator, with bloodhounds and torch-wielding villagers in frantic pursuit. In later years, Florey would reveal that his windmill finale had been inspired by the Van de Kamp building seen from his apartment on Ivar Street.

The film’s now iconic windmill provided an improbable but perfect, exotic setting for the film’s frenzied finale, the building itself dangerous with its creaky cogs and forbidding sails. When Frankenstein is thrown off the high balcony, the brutal fall was originally meant to be fatal. After the film wrapped, actor Colin Clive headed home to England proud that Universal had been bold enough to kill off its title character, but soon thereafter, an additional scene was shot with Clive and Mae Clarke spelled by stand-ins, showing the faithful Elizabeth nursing her poor Henry back to health, and available for a sequel. As for The Monster, he is last seen panicked out of his mind, pinned under a heavy wooden beam as fire laps around him. The follow-up, Bride of Frankenstein (1935), picks up at the windmill in smoking ruins where The Monster, burned and bruised, was saved when the structure collapsed into an underground pool.

Frankenstein’s windmill has been referenced in films, notably in the rip-roaring black and white opening scenes of the otherwise ghastly Van Helsing (2004). Director Tim Burton evokes the windmill as a miniature golf set in the original Frankenweenie short of 1984 and again as a hilltop building in the 2012 feature film version. There is also a spectacular and unmistakably Frankensteinian windmill in Burton’s Sleepy Hollow (1999).

Van de Kamp’s Holland Dutch Bakers was founded in 1915, soon sprouting a chain of stores and coffee shops with distinctive windmill facades and waitresses dressed as Dutch maidens complete with starched caps and decorative aprons. In the Forties, new buildings were streamlined, its windmills outlined in neon. The kooky architecture was eventually abandoned altogether, the bakeries operating out of regular buildings with a blue windmill motif appearing on logos. Van de Kamp’s changed hands a couple of times before collapsing into bankruptcy in 1990. The name survives in some areas as a supermarket brand for frozen foods.        

The site of the “Frankenstein windmill” at Ivar and Yucca is currently occupied by Joseph’s Café, a restaurant and dance bar. In the Google Map photo above, the domed structure at left is where the Windmill originally stood.

Related: Frankenstein Wraps

Rare Frankenstein Insert Card

It’s a bit of a miracle when something like this surfaces. Long ago, movie posters, paper ephemera, were typically discarded after use. Miraculously, 82 long years later, this insert card — 14 by 36 inches — survives, and it is likely the only one of its kind still in existence. Click the image to see it bigger.

ABCNews.com reports that this Frankenstein poster was bought by a Chicago man “for a few dollars” in the late Sixties. It is now up for auction with bidding currently at $75,000. It could top $100,000 by the time it is adjudicated, on July 27.

The image of The Monster’s head floating above Mae Clarke sprawled in a faint, here bathed in golden light, was used on several different posters and in newspaper ads. Karloff’s underlit face (see below) is one of the most striking of a series of promotional photographs by Universal’s Roman Freulich.

Unique here is the poster size and the gorgeous color treatment, with orange and yellow dots splashing off the image. It is, by far, the most colorful and jazzy of all the Frankenstein posters.

Follow the bidding on the new, redesigned Heritage Auctions website. Heritage Auctions is America’s biggest auction house and the third largest in the world.

Update! The Frankenstein Insert Card was sold on July 27, 2013 for a staggering $262,900.00, more than twice the top estimate for this item. 

FanTasia Festival 2013

The 2013 edition of Montreal’s FanTasia International Film Festival kicks off this Thursday, July 18, and runs for three delirious weeks in venues all over the city. In its 17th year, FanTasia is not only the largest genre film festival in North America, it has claimed its rightful place among the great festivals and film markets of the world. With over 120 feature films and countless shorts, this year’s offerings fill a 320-plus page program book. The full schedule is online now!

FanTasia walks the cutting edge of genre films, screening subversive horror, mind-blowing science fiction and fantasy, animation, a smattering of rediscovered classics, and the just plain unclassifiable, with many of the showings introduced by their creators. Filmmakers and actors from the world over attend, participate in panel discussions and party with the fans.

Richard Raaphorst’s Frankenstein’s Army — a project that has been percolating for six years — finally gets its North American premiere on July 20. Here’s the film’s schedule page, complete with a demented trailer. Also intriguing is the Canadian feature The Dead Experiment, about returning from the dead… and its alarming side effects.

Among the films and events I’ll be looking out for is Québécois writer-director Éric Falardeau’s Thanatomorphose, a transgressive horror film in which a young woman is “trapped in the irreversible process of human decomposition.” Then there’s a 75th anniversary celebration of Orson Welles’ broadcast of The War of the Worlds featuring audio excerpts from the radio show, a revival of the 1975 TV movie The Night That Panicked America, and a rarer-than-rare showing of a split-screen, condensed version of George Pal’s War of the Worlds of 1953 originally custom-created as an installation for Montreal’s World Expo in 1967.

Finally, the festival’s most anticipated live event this year — the legendary late-night parties aside — is Clive Barker’s play The History of the Devil, staged by Title 66 Productions at the prestigious Place des Arts Theater.

Keep up with this year’s FanTasia Festival on their daily News Blog.

Related:
Frankenstein’s Army

Son of Frankenstein fotobusta

Karloff’s Monster — holding the son of the Son of Frankenstein (1939) — strikes a commanding pose on this fotobusta, a large-format Italian lobby card. The photo insert shows The Monster mourning his felled friend, Lugosi’s Igor.

The monochromatic art is by the Corsican-born Francesco Giammari (1908-1973) who first came to prominence with his superb woodcuts illustrating the history and ethnography of his homeland. Moving to Italy, Giammari’s produced highly-charged symbolic art promoting the annexation of Corsica, a fascist ideal of the time. Today, Giammari, is regarded as one of the great Corsican artists for his early woodcuts as well as his fine art paintings and atmospheric landscapes.

Giammari’s movie poster art, running from the Thirties into the late Sixties, is quite traditional, generally featuring large portraits of the film’s principals. The striking, expressionistic Figlio di Frankenstein art shown here is a bit of a departure. Some of Giammari’s poster work is signed, simply, “Giam”. Note that he is sometimes misidentified in listings as “Gian Mari”.

Image source

Frankenstein Lends a Hand

Frankenstein’s Monster first began stalking city streets way back in ’31, promoting the original James Whale/Boris Karloff film, soon to become a ubiquitous figure, a mascot of sorts, at horror film premieres and costume balls, shopping mall openings and charity functions.

Here, Mr. Gary Fink poses in a rubber mask — and stilts? — with wife Kathy and child Luke, participating in a community event. The photo and its somewhat garbled caption appeared on September 14, 1982, in the Suburban News of Spencerport, a suburb of Rochester, New York.

Frankenstein Ads

The Frankenstein Monster has enjoyed a busy and enduring career as an advertising pitchman. Here’s a recent ad for T-Mobile spoofing AT&T's TV spots where an adult interacts with children. This one, substituting The Monster, is shot on a fantastic laboratory set, featuring a stylistic mashup meeting of a classic Universal-style flattop Monster and a Hammer/Cushing-like Dr. Frankenstein. There is also a fake "outtakes" video.


Casting back to 2010, click the image or follow the link to Ads of the World and watch a witty ad for the Crunch Fitness chain of gyms. This one's very much worth a look.

With thanks to Joe Thompson.


Related:
The Pitch of Frankenstein
The Beer of Frankenstein
Frankenstein Gets Relief