Here’s a find, I think. There are lots of photos of master
makeup man Jack Pierce working on or posing with Boris Karloff for his three
outings as Frankenstein’s Monster, but no shots of Pierce with Elsa Lanchester
in BRIDE makeup had ever surfaced, to my knowledge, until now.
The photograph here was found in the June 1935 issue of New
Movie magazine, just one of 12 small photos
of movie stars sharing space with cartoons and copy in a busy spread called Hollywood:
Day by Day. Reporter “Nemo” rattles off
short items of bubbleheaded scuttlebutt about such matters of import as Bing
Crosby’s day at the racetrack, Jean Harlow’s cellophane swimsuit, Clark Gable’s
big new car, and Lyle Talbot dropping his favorite fedora into Pat O’Brien’s
pool. Ann Dvorak poses with her lucky rabbit’s foot and the Bride picture
carries a laconic caption: “Elsa Lanchester wears fantastic make-up
for ‘Bride of Frankenstein’.”
New Movie, claiming “the
largest circulation of any screen magazine in the world”, first mentioned BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN in January
of 1935, when Karloff was said to be preparing for The Return of
Frankenstein. That issue also carried a
profile of Boris, entitled Karloff The Uncanny. In May, the film was now called BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN
and “guaranteed to give you bad dreams for three weeks”. A short, smart-alecky review signed Barbara Barry
— “New Movies Studio Scout” —
outlined the film and blew the punch: “And then, after all their
work, the incorporated damsel (Elsa Lanchester) takes one look at her
prospective bride-groom and proceeds to shriek herself unconscious! All of
which makes Karloff so dern mad that he blows up the whole joint!” In the same issue, Ms Barry, who seemed to relish
the art of the spoiler, also blurts out the ending to WEREWOLF OF LONDON,
though she is careful not to reveal the denouement of MARK OF THE VAMPIRE, but
making a big deal about how she’s holding back on a big surprise.
We’ve seen photos of Lanchester in her Bride costume posing
with a hand mirror and a makeup pencil, fixing her lipstick, as if the perfect
beestung look painted by Jack Pierce needed a touchup. One wonders if Pierce,
standing by, was simply cropped out of those shots. Nevertheless, we now have a
shot of Jack Pierce with one of his masterpieces, the weirdly glamorous Bride.
And now the hunt is on for a shot of Pierce with Lugosi as
The Monster from FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN (1943). There are shots of
Pierce working on Lugosi’s Igor — broken neck, snaggle tooth, fright wig and all
— for SON OF FRANKENSTEIN (1939) and GHOST OF FRANKENSTEIN (1942), but no
photograph of Pierce with Lugosi’s Frankenstein Monster has surfaced yet.
9 comments:
A grand find.
That Barbara Barry and I would not get along.
Gee, I hope they were able to salvage Lyle Talbot's hat.
Yes, it's new to me, Pierre. My first thought -- before reading your identical one -- was that Jack was cropped from the familiar shot of Elsa touching up her lipstick. Nice stuff.
I'd love to see a shot of Pierce with Lugosi's Monster. I've always wondered if maybe Jack hadn't shunted the bulk of that work off to an assistant. Not that a publicity photo would prove anything one way or the other.
Nice FIND, indeed.
Make that three of us! I suspected a crop, too, but it may indeed just be several shots from one shoot.
-Craig
Sensational! Thank you, Pierre.
The peril of posing alongside any outlandish creation such as The Bride, is of course that the person in normal attire will end up simply looking drab. My first instinct, from a layout point-of-view, would likewise be to crop Jack Pierce out of the shot too... and I dare say this is a fate that's befallen numerous other make-up artists in shots we think we know already from across the decades.
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