The Brisbane Frankenstein

Delighted to visit again with Brisbane’s Frankenstein impersonator of 1932. Rarely were ballyhoo men ever identified, but this one we know as Lance Robartson, reputedly the tallest man in Australia, standing six feet and eleven inches sans monster boots.

In our previous encounter, a photograph of Mr. Robartson was a poor one, as is often the case with microfilm sources. Here, finally, we get a good look at our Monster. No elaborate makeup was necessary. Size, costume, a deadpan stare and a matted wig did the job.

This photo from The Telegraph of June 10, 1932 chronicles Robartson’s arrival at the train station on Thursday the 9th, greeted by the press and a brave young man. That same evening, Robartson was the special guest at a dance cabaret soirée, all of it promoting Universal’s FRANKENSTEIN, opening that weekend at the city’s storied Tivoli theatre.

For more details about the event, read our original post: The Monster, In Person!

Source: The Brisbane Telegraph archives on Trove.

The Art of Frankenstein : Feg Murray (Part 2)

The formula for Feg Murray’s Seein’ Stars was typical of newspaper cartoon features: Large drawings accompanied by a short caption, usually some trivial or curious factoid. Here, in two examples from 1938 recycled as comic book filler, Feg Murray captures Karloff’s Monster in excellent likenesses, with copy addressing the endlessly repeated tidbit about “Frankenstein” being the creator’s name, not The Monster’s, and some rather creative math adding up Karloff’s time in the makeup chair.

It was not uncommon for newspaper strips and features to be re-used in comic books. In fact, comic books began as collections of newspaper strips, soon to be augmented with and eventually replaced by original material. Beginning in 1937, Murray’s Seein’ Stars was recycled along with other King Features syndicated material in Ace Comics and Magic Comics, published by the David McKay Publications out of Philadelphia.

Click the thumbnails to see the whole feature.

Breaking News! Halloween Celebrations Extended!

Er… Have you noticed, my Countdown to Halloween celebrations have yet to kick off?

Apologies. Professional obligations have taken up all my time this month, and I even managed to get in some serious Frankenstein-related research that I’ll be sharing with you in due time, so it’s all good. Nevertheless, I had a series of very special posts meant for Countdown October that I’ll be running now, beginning on Halloween day. Put it this way: I’m not late… Think of it as getting a headstart on my Countdown to Halloween for 2015!

Starting now — just a taste, above. Be sure to click the full feature to see it bigger — and through the next two weeks, I’ll bombard you all with a series of posts dedicated to the great Feg Murray, newspaper cartoonist and radio personality of the 30s and 40s whose Seein' Stars feature carried loads of monster art, mostly Universal films and frequent Frankenstein art. Feg Murray was, I believe, the #1 master of monster movie art before Basil Gogos came along.

Don’t forget to check the Countdown to Halloween site and have fun clicking through all the blogs that have made this Halloween another spectacular event. And be here tomorrow and over the days to come for the Feg Murray Art series, brought to you with the indispensable complicity of movie monster historian extraordinaire, George Chastain.

Happy Halloween!

Frankenstein in New York Frankenstein on Broadway

A deadpan Monster floats over Broadway, photographed during a revival run that opened on July 21, 1934. On its original release, late 1931, posters for FRANKENSTEIN carried a line under the title — as close to a subtitle the film ever had — reading, The Man Who Made a Monster. Here, surprisingly, the film’s title clearly reads FRANKENSTEIN THE KILLER, the only such known occurrence.

The Globe, its name evoking Shakespeare, was built as a high-hat, legit theater in 1910, with its vast entrance on 46th Street sporting soaring arches and a second-floor balcony where you could step outside and watch carriages unloading patrons. Inside, the latest innovations included a pipe and vent system bringing steam heat or ice cooling, season depending, to individual seats. The roof was built to slide open on a track system, though there is no record of it ever being used, with street noise, chimney soot and weather conditions likely providing reasons to keep the lid on. For twenty years, the Globe sparkled as one of New York’s leading theaters, home of such celebrated shows as the Ziegfield Follies and George White’s Scandals, Irving Berlin musicals and performances by Sarah Bernhardt and Fanny Brice. In 1929, owner Charles Dillingham was wiped out in the Stock Market Crash and the Globe went into receivership, soon to be one of several New York playhouses bought up by the Brandt chain and turned into movie houses.

The four Brandt brothers had kicked off their exhibitor career operating a hand-cranked projector stand at Coney Island, graduating to Nickelodeons and building up a theater circuit. Even as the Great Depression was hitting, the Brandts sold their holdings to Fox Pictures and used the proceedings to start another chain, snapping up failing theaters at downscale prices, kicking out the live burlesque and vaudeville acts and converting the premises to talkies. By the late Thirties, the Brandts owned 7 of the 11 movie houses on 42nd Street. They would go on to own 150 cinemas in New York and the upper East Coast.

When the Globe switched to movies in 1932, its opulent 46th Street façade was closed and the box-office moved to a small secondary entrance on Broadway. The Brandts hardly ever advertised, using instead the prime, high-visibility frontage on Times Square to announce their picture shows and pull patrons in from right off the street, or from among the thousands who stopped in next door for lunch at the Automat — the legendary diner which appears to have been the focus of our photograph.

The Globe splashed its loud displays clear across its narrow front and all the way up to full building height, like a vertical billboard, framing titles and movie star portraits in neon and dancing lights. FRANKENSTEIN rated a giant headshot of Karloff’s Monster with “The Killer” and “It’s a Sensation” in lightbulbs atop the marquee.

The Globe would run movies until 1957 when the theater changed hands and returned to its theatrical roots. The interior was gutted, its old configuration sacrificed to fine acoustics and modern styling. The narrow Broadway access was shut forever and the lavish 46th Street entrance restored. The Globe reopened in May of 1958 as the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, honoring the famous husband and wife actors Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. In the years since, top shows have included The Sound of Music and Hello Dolly!, Richard Burton as Hamlet, and the work of Bob Fosse and Marlene Dietrich. Disney’s live Beauty and the Beast premiered here in 1999.

For a century now, legends of stage and film have graced this storied house. For a fast few days in 1934, FRANKENSTEIN THE KILLER — Guaranteed for Gasps — stalked onscreen and stared down New Yorkers from his perch in the heart of Broadway.

The Globe Theater on Jerry’s Brokendown Palaces and Greenbriar Picture Shows.

The Lunt-Fontanne Theatre.

Related:

The Frankenstein of 14th Street

Frankenstein in New York The Frankenstein of 14th Street

By the time James Whale’s FRANKENSTEIN made it to New York, the film had hopscotched across America for two weeks, toppling box-office records along the way. On December 4, 1931, New Yorkers queued outside the Mayfair Theater in freezing rain for a look at the season’s Monster sensation. Extra showings were added to accommodate the endless crowds and by week’s end, over 76,000 patrons had set a new attendance record for the Times Square venue. The film would deploy to other area movie houses as a reliable attraction well into 1932.

This wonderful still of a Frankenstein Monster stand-in perched on an RKO promo truck has been circulating on the net, but without information as to date or location. It’s obviously an early promo stunt. The title of a Cagney film, BLONDE CRAZY —released, like FRANKENSTEIN, in mid-November ‘31 — appears behind the box-office booth. The theater is identified on the truck panel: It’s the RKO Jefferson, at 214 East 14th Street, near 3rd Avenue.

Universal’s Publicity Department suggested the “robot ballyhoo” stunt, having someone in Monster getup patrol the lobby and house front, or going for a spin around the block lugging ads on a sandwich board. Any tall man in a dark suit would do, usually decked-out in a fright wig and some greenish makeup to help the illusion. The player, here, is unidentified — perhaps a slumming vaudevillian or just someone off the street. A job was a job in Depression times. This facsimile Frankenstein wears a long-haired widow’s peak wig, knee-high boots and heavy gloves, like mechanical hands. FRANKENSTEIN posters sometimes gave Karloff what appears to be riveted steel arms.

Built in 1913 in the notorious Gashouse District as a top-notch Vaudeville theater, the Jefferson earned a reputation among show people as “the toughest house in New York”. The Marx Borthers, George Burns and Mae West were among those who braved the turbulent audiences.

Live acts still supported the featured movies when the theater was refurbished in 1947, but attendance had begun a downward trend, not the least because of wholesale evictions as the city enacted a plan to remodel the neighborhood. Competition from television would accelerate the Jefferson’s decline. KING KONG (1933) played the Jefferson on its highly publicized re-release in 1952, and horror host Zacherley brought his live spook show there in the Sixties. In the Seventies, on its last legs, the house switched to Spanish language programming for a while and then, in increasingly depressing disrepair, turned to porno. The once-proud Jefferson was eventually abandoned, an eyesore for twenty years until it was demolished in 1999.

An interesting sidenote: Right next door to the Jefferson is an Otto Altenburg piano store. Back in the day, the Altenburg company made a point of opening piano showrooms on the same block as theaters. The New Jersey-based company, founded in 1855, is still going strong today. The second-floor showroom at 212 East 14th Street closed in the late Thirties and was taken over by Irving Klaw’s legendary Movie Star News store, an exclusive outlet for celebrity photos and Klaw’s famous home-made cheescake and bondage stills. By the Fifties, it would become the go-to shop for Bettie Page fans. Movie Star News moved away in the mid-Eighties, when the area was at its seediest. The neighborhood today is completely transformed but the site of the storied Jefferson remains an empty lot.

Attended by men in hats and caps, including one gentleman in a neat bowler, the Frankenstein of 14th Street recalls a lost era when a couple could see live entertainment and a new movie in a palace settting for change on a dollar and the fun spilled onto the street outside, the house front festooned with eye-popping displays — note the Frankenstein title in dancing 3-D letters — and you might even bump into The Monster himself!

Sources: Cinema Treasures, Altenburgh Pianos.

Related:

All Seats 35 Cents

The Selling of Frankenstein

"The best friend I ever had"

Here’s a short clip from 1963 in which an affable Boris Karloff discusses FRANKENSTEIN. Here, in his own voice, is Karloff’s oft-told, oft-quoted, gently humorous anecdote of being asked to test for The Monster’s part by director James Whale. It makes for a good story but it is unlikely, of course, that Karloff was simply picked out of a studio lunchroom crowd. It has been said that it was David Lewis, Whale’s companion, who had first spotted Karloff looking perfectly sinister as Ned Galloway, the murderous trustee in Howard Hawk’s THE CRIMINAL CODE.

Karloff, always grateful and generous with praise, namechecks his friend, makeup man Jack Pierce, and figures “too or three weeks” of experimenting on the Monster’s makeup before it was ready for a screen test. This timeline is much more plausible than some claims having Pierce working on it for months on end.

Karloff also discusses the appeal of horror films and stories and reflects on how The Monster “changed the whole course of my life”. He’s understandably unclear about how many Frankenstein sequels were made, guessing at “at least a dozen of them”. There were eight, all told. There’s also a bit of an exaggeration when he says he came to the part “an obscure, struggling, unknown actor”. Fact is, Karloff was very busy, scoring showy parts in such films as THE GUILTY GENERATION, FIVE STAR FINAL and the aforementioned THE CRIMINAL CODE, three of the 16 films he made in 1931. Without FRANKENSTEIN, that made Karloff a household name, he still had a fine career underway as a supporting player in gangster and villain roles, typified by his performance in SCARFACE of 1932. Karloff was also garnering good press notices. In early 1931, well before the Frankenstein project was even underway, a prescient critic had already tagged Karloff as a contender for Lon Chaney-type parts.

Karloff was a gracious interviewee and it’s lovely hearing him say, in palpable sincerity, how “The Monster turned out to be the best friend I ever had”.

I spotted this clip on Facebook, courtesy of Stephen Jacobs, author of Boris Karloff: More Than a Monster.

Starring Colin Clive

I thought I’d seen all the stills and publicity material from the 1931 Frankenstein until this splendid photo  — marked PD (Publicity Department) # 940 — popped up on Facebook, courtesy of Colin Clive collector Sally Stark.

Wearing jodhpurs and high boots, Colin Clive strikes a dramatic pose on the Frankenstein set. The photographer was probably Roman Freulich. Boris Karloff posed in his Monster outfit for several photos against a similar leaning stonework background.

This was the costume Clive wore — with a coat — in the final chase and windmill scenes of the film. The breeches and boots are those of a horseman, and Clive was an avid if unlucky practitioner. As a young man, he suffered injuries — broken knee and broken leg — from two different riding accidents, cutting short his aspirations for a military career. Then, in 1931, having rushed home to England as soon as Frankenstein wrapped, Clive promptly fell off a horse and broke his hip. Perhaps he was just accident-prone. Kicking off his acting career, Clive was knocked down by a London bus on the very day he opened in the James Whale-directed play, Journey’s End. Come 1935, Clive suffered another injury, perhaps in a fall, just before Bride of Frankenstein started shooting. Playing up Frankenstein’s “convalescence” angle — having been mauled and thrown off the windmill by The Monster — Clive was allowed to do most of his scenes reclining or sitting down.

Related:
Frankenstein: Colin Clive

The Art of Frankenstein : Laurent Durieux

Belgian artist Laurent Durieux is a veteran A-list illustrator whose work has only recently become known in North America, mostly through his alternate movie posters created for Mondo. Durieux’ talent is on generous display in his singular take on James Whale’s Frankenstein.

Illustrating the pivotal flower scene, Durieux focuses on The Monster, holding a daisy. Note the little girl’s presence as a shadow, barely visible, under the titles. Note the ominous background, a field of brambles. Note The Monster’s expression, hesitant, perhaps captivated by the flower’s fragrance, trying to understand what is happening.

The Monster’s brief existence has been couched in fear and violence. Roaming the countryside, he encounters a child who takes him by the hand and invites him to play. It is the only solace he will ever know. In the next instant, everything will go terribly wrong. You can see the wheels turning in his head. Is the little girl like a flower?

Durieux has captured a fleeting moment, at once beautiful and terrible, suspended in time. A key scene, a simple statement, beautifully designed and rendered, laden with meaning.

Durieux’ posters are typically charged with suspense. A poster for The Wolf Man captures the cursed Larry Talbot’s despair at the soul-crushing moment when he has just begun to transform. A poster for The Mummy is full of mystery, romance and terror, a knife signifying that immortal life begins with death. Durieux favors genre films, fantasy worlds and space opera, everything from King Kong and The Wizard of Oz to Metropolis and Buck Rogers. His Frankenstein poster, you will agree, is a masterpiece.

Visit Laurent Durieux’ website and portfolio.

Mondo poster site.

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. 

Scary Monsters No. 85: Jack Pierce, Frankendesigner

Makeup legend Jack Pierce poses with some of his creations, including Monster and Bride, on this splendid wraparound cover for Scary Monsters Magazine by Terry Beatty.

In a busy field of horror film magazines, publisher/editor Dennis Druktenis’ Scary Monsters stands out as an engaging and uniquely fun title, a throwback to the “monsterfan” era down to its packaging, printed in black and white on cheap newsprint. Each hefty issue is crammed to the gills celebrating monster movies and the monster memories of Monster Kids. The eclectic offerings in the issue at hand include a meeting with the Black Lagoon’s Julie Adams, an article on the making of The Hideous Sun Demon, Charlton comics’ take on Reptilicus, and an entertaining look at mad scientist Boris Karloff’s pseudo-scientific wall scribblings from House of Frankenstein. And that’s not half of the content in this particular issue!

The cover feature is Larry (aka horror host Dr. Gangrene) Underwood’s defense of Jack Pierce as the true designer of the iconic movie Frankenstein Monster. In recent years, it’s been argued that others, and principally director James Whale, had considerable and even decisive influence on the character’s appearance. Underwood digs up and discusses a rich assortment of quotes pro and con. Underwood’s article is passionate and highly opinionated, leading to a perhaps foregone conclusion in Pierce’s favor, but the fun of the piece, and what makes it a great read, is that it is generous with quotes and references, allowing the reader to form his or her own conclusions. Another big plus is the complete text of a previously un-translated profile of Jack Pierce originally published in a Spanish-language newspaper.

Scary Monsters Magazine No. 85 is available directly from the publisher — come on, try a copy! — and Larry Underwood’s article, Jack Pierce, Frankendesigner is also available separately as an e-article for Kindle. 

Scary Monsters website.

Larry Underwood’s Dr. Gangrene blog. 

Cagney Does Frankenstein

Late 1931, James Whale’s Frankenstein was an instant hit. Propelled by its photogenic Monster, the film’s popularity grew as it circulated across America and around the world. Very quickly, “Frankenstein” was name-checked in movies — typically, a line in Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933) went, “I don't know what he was, but he made Frankenstein look like a lily!”— and Karloff’s square-headed profile cameod in Betty Boop and Mickey Mouse cartoons.

One reference, significant but rarely if ever mentioned, punctuates a scene in Footlight Parade, a big budget Warner Bros musical of 1933. You can see the Frankenstein reference in the video clip embedded above. Here’s the set-up…

James Cagney plays an energetic musical comedy director who’s going out of business because of the new talking pictures. In the late Twenties, theaters had begun transitioning from live vaudeville to all-movie programs. By the early Thirties, with the advent of sound, short musical and comedy acts could be filmed and shown as cheap alternatives to increasingly expensive live entertainment. In Footlight Parade, Cagney’s character has a brainstorm: If he can put his shows — so-called “Prologues” — on tour, their cost would be shared across dozens, perhaps a hundred different theaters, making his live, “ready-made” Prologues affordable to exhibitors.

Soon, Cagney is in over his head managing several Prologues playing natiowide and having to come up with new themes every week to keep up with the demand. “I’m daffy coming up with new ideas,” he complains to his girl Friday, Joan Blondell. “We’ve done everything!” he says, pointing to a long list of touring “units” with themes including Soldier Girls, Bull Fighters, Ghosts, Voodoo, the Russian Revolution and a Cuban show. “A unit a week, where am I going to get any more ideas?”

Blondell talks Cagney into closing down for the night and going home to rest. Cagney reluctantly agrees and, as he walks away, he can’t help coming up with a new idea…

Cagney starts for the door and jerks to a stop. “Say,” he asks. “What’s the name of that foreigner that built a monster he couldn’t stop?” . “Frankenstein” Blondell replies. “Shake hands with his Aunt Emma!” Cagney quips. Then comes the payoff: Cagney opens the door, stops, stands with his back to us, and turns. “Frankenstein…” he says. “Swell idea for a unit!”

The scene might suggest that Cagney sees himself as Frankenstein, overwhelmed by his work, a monster he can’t stop. More obviously, the scene shows Cagney as preoccupied and always “on”, thinking up new themes even when he’s knocking off for the day. Best of all, Cagney takes it to the limit, specifically referencing The Monster’s introduction when Karloff first appears at the laboratory door, backing into the room and slowly turning on the doorstep for his big reveal. 

Footlight Parade — with 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933 — was the last of a trio of Warners musicals released in 1933, all featuring incredibly elaborate musical numbers staged by the legendary Busby Berkeley. A late pre-code film, it abounds in racy dialog — with many great lines delivered by the fabulous Blondell — and risqué situations, notably the Honeymoon Hotel number. It even dares to lampoon censors, with comic Hugh Herbert appearing as a clownish inspector. At its core, Footlight Parade is just another “Show Must Go On’ musical, albeit one done on a dazzling scale. It’s also wildly  entertaining yet, for all its memorable music and All-Star cast, what had audiences really buzzing was leading man Cagney, best known for his violent, tough-guy gangster roles, who steps up and delivers a formidable song and dance number in the film’s all-out finale.

In another Frankenstein connection, one of the waterlogged chorus girls in the film’s mind-boggling By a Waterfall number was Cynthia Lindsay, a one time stunt double who went on to write TV sitcoms, notably episodes of My Three Sons in the Sixties. In 1975, Lindsay wrote Dear Boris, an affectionate biography of family friend Boris Karloff.

Here's a terrific, vintage trailer for Footlight Parade.

Related:
Cagney Does Frankenstein, Again!

Man or Monster?

In the long ago days before standardized, top-down, corporate-designed film advertising, selling a movie was usually the province of individual exhibitors who mixed and matched from a wide range of studio-provided promotional materials, or had their own ads made up by in-house artists. Here’s a very unusual newspaper ad for Frankenstein (1931) showing a stripped-down Monster in loincloth, revealing robot legs with ankle bolts and mechanical fingers. A scientifically manufactured demon!... Watch His Eyes!... Man or Monster?  

The Monster’s menacing stare evoques Karloff’s gaunt and grim features, though the actor doesn’t get a credit here. Mae Clarke is prominently featured.

Another lost pleasure of the era was the full film program that typically included shorts, cartoons and companion features. Many theaters still carried live Vaudeville acts as filler. It is fascinating to consider the films — often musicals or flat-out comedies — that were screened alongside Frankenstein’s grand guignol, making for a very eclectic evening at the movies.

Here, Frankenstein is backed with something called an Organlogue, a newsreel and a 20-minute feature, Many a Sip, starring Charles “Chic” Sale — sometimes billed as “Sales” — a former vaudevillian who specialized in Old Man and “rural” characters. Forgotten today, Sale was once so popular as to be name-checked onscreen by Groucho Marx. Sale’s 1929 book, The Specialist, ostensibly written to copyright his widely copied material, was a massive bestseller, translated into nine languages. Chic Sales passed away in 1936, aged 51. Twenty years later, his influence was still felt as it inspired a young comic, Soupy Hines, to change his name to Soupy Sales. 

Many a Sip was directed by Mark Sandrich who would soon graduate from shorts to features and go on to direct Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in such classics as Top Hat, Follow the Fleet and Shall We Dance. 

I have no provenance for the ad here, likely published in late 1931 or early ’32. This Rialto theater could be anywhere. If anyone can pinpoint this one, please share.

Image source: Greggory’s Shock Theater.

A Frankenstein Photo Reference

Boris Karloff breaks for a photo session during the filming of Frankenstein. It's late summer or fall of 1931.

In full makeup, sometimes grimacing but mostly deadpan, with raccoon eyes and sunken cheeks, impossibly gaunt, Karloff posed face front and profile, hands up to his face or straight down, fingers splayed and dead man stiff. He appears in closeup or full figure leaning precariously forward, anchored by his heavy boots. The photographer, most likely Universal’s Roman Freulich, lights The Monster with a low, eerie light or a strong spotlight for a stark effect.

The studio’s Publicity Department would send these stills out to papers and magazines, and studio artists would use them as reference for poster paintings or line art for newspaper ads. Case in point, this unusual pose, Karloff leaning forward off a stool covered with a sheer black veil, was repurposed for a very effective small ad. With the title swooshing dynamically across the image, The Monster — “The World’s First ‘Man-Made’ Man” — lurches menacingly at a generic cowering victim.

Frankenstein played a weekend gig at The Beacon on Main Street in Port Washington, Long Island. The theater opened as a Vaudeville and movie house in 1927 with 1600 seats. Heavily remodeled since then, it is still showing movies today.

Back in January 1932, The Beacon’s patrons got a double dose of Frederick Kerr, the bumbling old Baron Frankenstein who also appeared opposite Warren Williams in the companion feature, Honor of the Family, an elaborate costumer based on a story by Honoré de Balzac. That film is lost. Only the Vitaphone sound disks have survived along with a handful of lobby cards. 

Brian Ewing's Frankenstein

Here’s artist Brian Ewing’s perfect companion piece to his recent Bride of Frankenstein poster. Boris gets the same meticulously layered treatment: Bones, muscle and Monster.

Click to Brian’s page for the Frankenstein artwork, with links his posts outlining the process. Terrific stuff.

Related:

The Art of Frankenstein: Brian Ewing

Counting Down to Halloween

Well, Autumn is here and in a few more days, the roads of October will take us to Halloween. Kicking off the season in great style, Rue Morgue — consistently the best mass-market genre magazine — celebrates Universal’s centennial with a fantastic lineup that includes historian David J. Skal. On the cover, a fabulous bust of Boris as Frankenstein’s Monster by Toronto-based artist Justin Erickson.

Rue Morgue No. 127 will be available on newsstands and digital download on October first.

Boris, and Universal’s 100th are further celebrated next month as Turner Classic Movies host a special double-bill showing of Frankenstein (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935) in selected theaters across America. This is a rare chance to see these classics on the big screen in sharp, remastered copies. The evening includes a recorded presentation by TCM stalwart Robert Osborne interviewing Sara Karloff, Bela Lugosi Jr. and makeup wizard Rick Baker.

The one-time TCM Frankenstein Event happens on October 24. Check the Fathom Events website for details, a list of theaters, and tickets.

And then, there’s Countdown to Halloween 2012 — hosted by the indefatigable team of John Rozum and Shawn Robare — where bloggers celebrate the spooky season every day, all month long. I’ll have a badge up on the menu that’ll take you to the Countdown site and, there, you can click through a long list of blogs and enjoy a boggling variety of Halloween-theme posts. There were over 250 participants last year! It’s great fun and a great way to discover new blogs.

I’ll be contributing to the Countdown with our companion blogs — Monster Crazy, Frankenstein Forever — and here on Frankensteinia, where I will be running another Frankenstein Book Month. I’ll be posting here every other day, reviewing Frankenstein-themed books and showcasing eye-popping Frankenstein graphic novels, including many NEW titles!

Join me, won’t you, for the Countdown to Halloween and Frankenstein Book Month, coming in ten days!

Frankenstein Fashions

“Don’t underestimate the value of your screen fashions” advised Photoplay magazine, in December 1931. “You can go back home with a wealth of ideas for pepping up your own clothes picture.”

As an unusual and subtle way to plug their hot new horror film, Frankenstein, just then rolling out across America, Universal entertained Photoplay magazine’s young women readers with pictures of Mae Clarke, the film’s Elizabeth, modeling screen-worn fashions.

Published under the title Stars Broaden Shoulder Lines, the first photo shows Clarke in the fur collar dress — “Worn in Frankenstein” — from scenes where she and Victor recruit Dr. Waldman and travel through a storm to the tower laboratory where her fiancé, Henry Frankenstein, treats them to a lightning show and the first stirrings of his slab-bound Monster.

The second photo shows Clarke in a light wool crepe number accessorized with a “vest-like arrangement” of baronduki, a fancy name for the Siberian squirrel. This is the dress she wore in the scene where Elizabeth returns to the lab, this time with Henry’s pompous father, only to find her beloved in a state of nervous collapse. “See this in Frankenstein” reads the copy.

The studio, or perhaps the magazine editors, chose to show Clarke in smart street clothes, something readers could aspire to. In the film, Clarke also appears in a very chic lace dress and, of course, a spectacular wedding gown with an endless train.

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Photoplay Frankenstein
Frankenstein Gossip in Photoplay

Frankenstein Gossip in Photoplay

Launched in 1911, Photoplay was the number one movie fan magazine for most of its 78 year run. Its contributors included some of the most famous film reporters ever assembled, notably Adele Rogers St. John, Dorothy Kilgallen, Walter Winchell, and competing gossip queens Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons. The magazine’s most prolific correspondent was one Cal York, introduced in 1916 and still active when the magazine folded in 1989.

Here, two items from Cal York’s Monthly Broadcast From Hollywood column marked the genesis of Frankenstein, when Bela Lugosi was cast as The Monster, and the release of the finished film, with substitute Boris Karloff.

From the August 1931 issue, a short item hails Lugosi as the new Lon Chaney, fresh from Dracula and now slated to play “the unborn man” in Frankenstein. The Monster would be eight feet tall, with only the actor’s chin and eyebrows poking through the makeup.

Jumping to December 1931, Cal York’s column carries an anecdote about set visitors, namechecks director James Whale, and reports that Boris Karloff toiled under 48 pounds of makeup and “body structure”, causing him to lose 21 pounds.

If the items read like studio-fed publicity, guess what. “Cal York” was a house name (CALifornia – New YORK) serving an ever-changing staff of contributors, and the monthly “Broadcast from Hollywood” column was a collection of tidbits gleaned from studio PR. Of Frankenstein’s makeup torture, contemporary newspapers carried the same stories, often augmented to include Lugosi’s monster face improbably melting in sunlight and Karloff given leg braces and an inexplicable steel spine, creating his mechanical gait. The story about wearing a veil to and from the set was substantiated with obviously posed photographs of Karloff, head covered, led around by makeup man Jack Pierce.

The hype was fanciful, sometimes outrageous, and always entertaining. Finding factual information within these stories is much like panning for elusive gold.

Next up: Universal targets Photoplay’s young female readers with Frankenstein fashions!

Cal York info from Andrew Slide’s book Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine (University Press of Mississippi, 2010).

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Photoplay Frankenstein

Photoplay Frankenstein

Boris The Monster makes an unlikely appearance in the November 1931 issue of Photoplay, the leading movie fan magazine of its time, where picture space was usually reserved for Hollywood’s most glamorous stars.

In stunning profile, likely shot by Universal still photographer Roman Freulich, Karloff’s face shines through the heavy makeup. Perhaps the photograph was taken before final touches were applied, or it was lit in such a way as to wash out the dark paint that gave The Monster its dead-man gauntness of thin black lips, sunken cheeks and dark circles under the eyes.

Note that we see Karloff’s forehead, perhaps treated with greasepaint or thin gauze. Note the brow ridge and the crown, built up separately. With The Monster’s next outing, for Bride of Frankenstein in 1935, makeup man Jack Pierce would use a one-piece, full forehead rubber appliance that simplified and sped up application. Note also, that Karloff doesn’t appear to be wearing the heavy eyelids that gave The Monster its menacing, lizard-like stare. The story goes that Karloff himself suggested the droopy lids, to dull The Monster’s eyes. Here, the eyes are bright and intelligent.

Photoplay was launched in 1911 as a film-related fiction magazine, soon to embrace the nascent Star System and quickly evolving into a massively influential film celebrity magazine, reigning at the peak of Hollywood’s Golden Age. With a writing staff that included the nation’s top gossip columnists, Photoplay typically featured profiles of big name performers, with heavy emphasis on their romantic liaisons, as well as movie star fashions and beauty tips.

The issue at hand featured comedienne Ina Claire on the cover, painted by F. Earl Christy. A cover blurb warned, Don’t Go Platinum Blonde Yet! Wait!. Articles included The Extra-Private Life of Marlene Dietrich, Why Women Go Crazy About Clark Gable, and a profile of firebrand “Loop-de-Lupe Velez”. Though the magazine acknowledged the popularity of chillers, horror films got very little coverage in Photoplay, too grim a subject for its glamour-seeking readers. It speaks to Frankenstein’s novelty and box-office clout that the film won some degree of attention from the nation’s best-selling movie magazine.

Stick around, we’ll look at more Frankenstein references from Photoplay over the next couple of posts. 


Related:Frankenstein Gossip in Photoplay

The Line Starts Here

Spotted on the Zombos’ Closet blog, this remarkable photo showing patrons crowding the lobby and trailing out to the street, waiting to see Frankenstein (1931) on its first run. The anticipation is palpable. Soon as the usher drops the velvet rope, you know there’s going to be a scramble for the best seats in the house.

Oh, to have seen Frankenstein back then. Today, the film’s themes and design have been sampled to the point of becoming clichés, and The Monster is a universal icon. We can only imagine how perfectly thrilling it must have been when the film was new.  

There’s no provenance given here, this could be any theater in the English-speaking world. Note the fabulous and very rare “graverobber” poster. I don’t know of any of these that have survived. I’ve only seen this image before on a Swedish poster and as a line drawing used in newspaper ads. 

Zombos’ Closet, operated by John Cozzoli, is a superlative blog devoted to the celebration of horror in popular culture. It touches everything from Halloween and B-Movies to discussions on horror fiction and serious studies of the genre. It is also a wonderful resource for images. Case in point, check out this recent posting of the complete, original 1942 pressbook for The Ghost of Frankenstein.

With thanks to John Cozzoli.