Frankenstein Friday Round Up

Don Megowan kicks back and chills on the set of Tales of Frankenstein (see previous post) while we round up recent Frankenstein sightings on the net.

Frankenstein Elected

On the news front, Frankenstein won his elections in the Indian northeastern state of Meghalaya. Other candidates for Congress included Hitler, Newton, Kennedy, Rockefeller, and Tony Curtis. Read all about it in the Hindustan Times.

The Frankenswizzler

On the novelty front, Frankensteinia reader Tony Lee spotted a Mon-Stir Frankenstein swizzlestick on eBay. Produced by Zoo-Piks in 1964, it was part of a Universal-licensed set that included the Mummy, Wolfman and the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

The red Frankenstein swizzlestick is shown here with a Frankenstein iron-on transfer, a Mister Softee Ice Cream premium, also from 1964. Stick and iron-on are offered by Mpgstuff.

Thanks, Tony!

Frankenstein Mask

Also on eBay recently, this one from Toy Ranch, is Herman, a rare Don Post Frankenstein mask from 1989. It’s a full-head job with real hair and a yellow-tooth grin.

Don Post created the very first commercially available Frankenstein rubber mask sixty years ago. His studio produced several Frankenstein models through the years, either licensed likenesses or generics, like Herman. It is said that back in the 50s and 60s, Frankenstein masks accounted for 70% of all monster mask sales.

Plug-In Frankenstein

Another Toy Ranch offering is the Telco Frankenstein Motionette, a 24-inch statue with a big green head and a melancholic expression. Plug it in and it rattles its chains. These were produced in the early 90s and available in various sizes and your choice of A/C or battery versions.

Frankenstein Legion

And finally, those of you who enjoyed David Lee Ingersoll’s fabulous Legion of Frankensteins illustration that I originally posted about here, should check out his Skook blog where he is currently sharing some of the preliminary sketches for that piece.

Tales of Frankenstein

Fifty years ago this week, on March 25 to be precise, Hammer Films executive producer Michael Carreras fired off a letter to his counterpart Ralph Cohn of Screen Gems in New York. The subject was the recently completed pilot for Tales of Frankenstein. The proposed television series was to be co-produced in equal measure, thirteen half-hour episodes apiece, by Hammer in England and Screen Gems, the television arm of Columbia Pictures, in America.

Carreras had not yet seen the pilot, The Face in the Tombstone Mirror, shot in Hollywood, but when news came that it had cost $80,000, Carreras complained that the episode could have been made at Bray Studios for roughly half the price. “The reason I am making such a bloody nuisance of myself” he wrote, “is because I have tremendous faith in this series and I honestly believe that we can make them better than anyone else.” Somewhat presumptuously, he added, “Let me know when you are ready to start.”

The pilot turned out to be competent enough to attract cautious interest by the ABC network. Development of the series continued through the coming months, but the collaboration between Hammer and Columbia was never an easy one. Hammer producer Anthony Hinds had dropped out of the project after a frustrating visit to America, and Carreras would later refer to the project as “one of the unhappiest experiences of my screen career”. The project, perhaps inevitably, fizzled. The pilot aired occasionally as late-night filler on American TV and eventually fell into the Public Domain.

The Face in the Tombstone Mirror is a curious hybrid, mixing the classic Universal Frankensteins with a distinct Hammer Film vibe. Curt Siodmak, who, a dozen years previous, had written Universal’s Frankenstein Meets The Wolfman (1943), and House of Frankenstein (1944) wrote the story, produced and directed the episode. The script was finished by Catherine and Henry Kuttner (also known as Lewis Padgett). Henry was a famous science fiction writer who had been friends with H.P.Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith. He passed away suddenly, of a heart attack, in February of 1958, shortly after delivering the script.

For all the name talent, the script proved to be simple-minded and clichéd. The direction was workmanlike and pedestrian. Spark was provided by the curt, calculating Anton Diffring as Baron Frankenstein, very much in the cold-hearted Peter Cushing mold. The striking Helen Westcott was also effective as the devoted wife of a doomed artist. The doughy-faced Monster is played by six foot six character actor Don Megowan, who holds the distinction of being the only actor to have played both the Frankenstein Monster and the air-breathing Gillman, in The Creature Walks Among Us (1956).

As this Tale opens, in a scene reminiscent of Hammer’s then recent Curse of Frankenstein (1957), the Monster is no sooner brought to life that it lunges to strangle its creator. There’s an explosion and The Monster shorts out. Frankenstein reflects over the fallen Creature: “Your brain came from the skull of a murderer. You still wanted to kill. But, with the right brain, the brain of an intelligent man, a good man… Where will I find it?”

Enter Christine Halpert (Westcott), seeking urgent help. Her husband, Paul (Richard Bull), is dying of some unspecified “critical” illness. The Baron turns them away, but not before registering interest in Paul’s “good hands” and artistic bent.

In quick succession, Paul dies and is buried in the local cemetery. Frankenstein promptly digs him up and performs a brain upgrade on his hulking Monster. Meanwhile, visiting the grave, Christine finds a discarded locket that had been buried with her husband. She gets the caretaker, Frankenstein’s grave-robbing accomplice, to spill the beans, and heads for the castle. The Monster recognizes her and carries her away, but stops in his tracks when he sees himself in a mirror.

The Monster now turns on the Baron and the chase takes them back to the graveyard where Christine reasons with The Monster: “The life you had was brief, but it was decent and good. Don’t destroy everything now because of a hideous face and grotesque body… that aren’t yours!”

The Monster contemplates his situation and hurls himself into the open, collapsing grave, embracing the death he had briefly cheated. A constable appears and arrests the Baron for grave robbing.

“You have your job to do,” Frankenstein says, “and so have I. And I don’t think either of us would let anything stand in the way of fulfilling our respective destinies. Time is of small matter, you see… There’s always tomorrow!”

Before the project was finally canned, Hammer Films hired a handful of writers to come up with potential script material. Jimmy Sangster, author of Hammer’s Frankenstein, Dracula and Mummy pictures, came up with a dozen one-line story ideas (“He has a set to with Zombies”). Other writers provided themes that would be recycled in upcoming Frankenstein movies, notably a mesmerist episode that wound up as the core of Evil of Frankenstein (1964), and a beautiful, but soulless female monster that anticipates the character in Frankenstein Created Woman (1967).

One understands Michael Carreras’ enthusiasm and frustration. Hammer Films had just recently exploded on the scene, its gothic horrors were box-office gold. In 1958, Monsters were beginning to hit big. The Shock Theater package of Universal horror movies was a late-night TV phenomenon. Today, we know that monster magazines, bubble gum cards, plastic kits and toys, the Corman/Price pictures of AIP, The Addams Family and The Munsters were all coming down the pike. In retrospect, it seems that there was a Monster Kid audience out there that would have embraced a Frankenstein TV series.

Tales of Frankenstein: The Face in the Tombstone Mirror can be seen online or downloaded from Archive.org. It’s definitely worth a look.

Some of the details in this post were found in the excellent The Hammer Story (1997, revised 2007) by Marcus Hearn and Alan Barnes.

Frankenstein, 1958

1958 was a good year for monsters, with Frankenstein front and center.

TV stations across North America were cashing in on the popularity of the Shock Theater package of Universal horrors, bringing the classic monsters to a new generation of fans. Philadelphia-based publisher, James Warren, picked up on the monster buzz and launched a monster movie magazine. That's him posing on the first issue’s cover in a rubber Frankenstein mask.

Edited by Forrest Ackerman, Famous Monster of Filmland hit the streets 50 years ago, on February 27, to be exact, even as blizzards hammered the East Coast. Success was instantaneous. FM was the right magazine at the right time, and it became the keystone of the Monster Kid era.

Anyone who ever read an issue back then is bound to wax nostalgic, and nobody does it better than VideoWatchdog editor and blogger Tim Lucas in this recent post, an homage to Famous Monsters that is both loving and level-headed. A great read.

Simultaneous with Famous Monsters being released in North America, Hammer Films of England was busy wrapping up the immediate sequel to their 1957 worldwide blockbuster, The Curse of Frankenstein. Reuniting writer Jimmy Sangster, director Terence Fisher and star Peter Cushing, The Revenge of Frankenstein would come to be recognized by many as the best of a series that would eventually stretch to seven films. In this perverse tale, Cushing’s cruel Baron runs a charity hospital, culling body parts from his unlucky patients. Michael Gwynn plays Frankenstein’s brain-switched experiment who develops a taste for human flesh.

Hammer was also involved in a second Frankenstein project, an ill-fated television series, produced in partnership with Columbia Pictures’ TV arm, Screen Gems. The pilot for Tales of Frankenstein was entirely shot in America, co-written and directed by Curt Siodmak, screenwriter for Universal’s monster-mix pictures Frankenstein Meets The Wolfman (1943), and House of Frankenstein (1944). Don Megowan played a classic, old school Frankenstein Monster to Anton Diffring’s Cushing-like, upturned collar Baron. The two styles mixed uneasily and Hammer producer Michael Carreras was not pleased. Work on the project continued through the year, inevitably to sputter out. Some of the concepts developed by Hammer writers would find their way into the company’s subsequent Frankenstein films.

American-International Pictures, in Hollywood, also rushed to sequelize their own Frankenstein, with Gary Conway returning as the busted-headed Teenage Frankenstein in How To Make a Monster. The story deals with a crazed makeup man (Robert H. Harris) who, when he gets canned by the studio, mixes drugs and greasepaint, turning his monster movie actors into zombies to do his murderous bidding. Gary Clarke played a snaggletooth Teenage Werewolf, a part originated by Michael Landon. In typical AIP hyperbole, the film was advertised as being in “flaming color!”, but it was really in black and white up to the last reel, when it switched to color for the fiery climax.

Also in 1958, Boris Karloff, the actor most identified with Frankenstein, then as now, returned to the fold in a low-budget shocker called Frankenstein 1970. Karloff gamely plays a scar-faced Baron Frankenstein cooking up a new atomic-powered Monster in the castle’s basement. Six-foot eight wrestler Mike Lane played the Gumby-like, mummy-wrapped Monster.

An even cheaper and unabashedly schlocky production was Richard Cunha’s Frankenstein’s Daughter. Actually, the scientist was Frankenstein’s grandson — the Frankenstein film family is large and complex — who produces a singularly homely creature played by acromegalic character actor Harry Wilson. Legend is that makeup man Harry Thomas did not know the Monster’s head was supposed to be female, so he applied lipstick to the creature he had designed, and that did the trick. Wilson’s robot walk is hilarious and the whole film is kooky enough to be weirdly entertaining.

The final Frankenstein of 1958 stalked South of the border. The influence of Universal’s Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein echoed, ten years on, in El Castillo de los monstruos, in which comic Clavillazo encounters the Frankenstein Monster, a Gillman, a Werewolf, a Mummy, and the great German Robles in a cameo as Dracula. I blogged previously about this and other Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein Knockoffs. That post includes a link to a YouTube excerpt from the film.

A couple of Frankenstein-themed films rounded out the year. Colossus of New York is a minor but fascinating science-fiction thriller in which a towering robot is fitted with the brain of a Nobel Peace Prize winner. The experiment fritzes the donor’s humanitarian impulses and culminates in a showdown at the United Nations. Real-life giant Ed Wolff works the bulky, expressionless robot suit. He had previously played the big, clumsy, totem-headed robot in the 1939 Bela Lugosi serial, The Phantom Creeps.

And, finally, Alraune, aka Unnatural, was a German film made in 1952 and released in America in the Frankenstein year of 1958. The story of a soulless, artificially created woman had been filmed a number of times before, notably with Metropolis robot star Brigitte Helm playing the part twice, first in a silent version and then a talking remake. This version featured the striking Hildegard Knef as Alraune to Erich von Stroheim’s Frankensteinian scientist, Ted Brinken.

And so it was, fifty years ago, when the all-purpose Frankenstein Monster launched a legendary magazine… Drove Hammer Films’ sudden, steep, upward curve of success that would establish it as the premier studio of cinema horrors… Tail-ended AIP’s drive-in, teen-monster era, soon to evolve into the Corman-Price-Poe gothic sixties… Provided the venerable Boris Karloff with yet another mad scientist credit… And distinguished a handful of B-movies.

1958 was a good year for Frankenstein.