The Posters of Frankenstein : Luigi Martinati

Escaping the lab, broken chain trailing from its hairy claw, The Monster’s shadow falls on a victim in this fanciful image for the Italian release of Hammer’s The Curse of Frankenstein (1957).

Artist Luigi Martinati’s career began with billboard art and advertising campaigns, notably for Fiat. He started painting movie posters in the early Thirties, eventually devoting himself exclusively to film from the mid-Forties and straight on through the Sixties, sharing the workload — and a similar style of art — with fellow painters Anselmo Ballester and Alfredo Capitani, operating as Studio BCM. Martinati’s signature, when it appears, is usually found at the top of the poster.

Shown here are Martinati posters for Them (1954), Wuthering Heights (1939) and Hammer’s The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll (1960).

Martinati created another striking poster for Hammer’s Frankenstein film (previously posted here), showing The Monster’s shackled claw grasping at a window.

Luigi Martinati passed away in 1983, at age 90.

Two generous galleries of Martinati posters: Il Manifesto Storico and MoviePosterDB.

Related:
La Maschera di Frankenstein

The Art of Frankenstein : Shane Oakley

Here’s a fake book cover for Frankenstein that looks better than most of the real ones out there. UK artist Shane Oakley created this image in the style of an old paperback cover. The symmetrical effect and simple color design are pitch perfect references to ‘60s graphics.

I love Oakley’s art, all hard angles and stark contrasts. Some of his black and white illustrations are as rigorously controlled as paper cutouts, witness his interpretations of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing from Curse of Frankenstein (1957), typical of his sparse and perfect, to-the-point work for Little Shoppe of Horrors magazine.

There’s lots of great art to admire and enjoy on Shane Oakley’s blog. The faux cover was originally created for Hey, Oscar Wilde! It’s Clobberin’ Time!

With thanks to David Lee Ingersoll

Thank You, Jimmy Sangster

Screenwriter Jimmy Sangster passed away on Friday, August 29. He was 83.

I’ve told the story before, about a fateful summer day in ’61 or ’62 when I fell in love with movies at a neighborhood theatre running a triple bill of The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Horror of Dracula (1958) and The Mummy (1959). A few weeks later, they played The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958) and I was dazzled again. All these films were made by Hammer Films of England, with the same casts and crews. They all starred Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, all shared the distinctive production design of Bernard Robinson and the magical photography of Jack Asher. They were all directed with uncommon intelligence by Terence Fisher, and they were all written by Jimmy Sangster. No question, these films were driven by the extraordinary collaboration of all these men, but it was Sangster who provided the raw material, the basic scripts that gave Fisher and company something to chew on.

Sangster was, I think, underappreciated. Sangster’s contributions to the horror genre were monumental, yet he was often tagged as a hack, just batting out his scripts, and he didn’t help the impression with his flippantly titled bio, Do You Want It Good, or Tuesday? It reads like a rough draft and Sangster frustratingly glosses over the Hammer years, dwelling on his later work for American television. Yet, he had done so much more. Over time, having seen waves of horror films, I came to appreciate how profoundly original and perfectly subversive films like, say, The Revenge of Frankenstein or Brides of Dracula (1960) had been.

I often thought of Jimmy Sangster throughout my career. I began as a cartoonist and illustrator, writing comics for myself and others. I remembered and tried to replicate how Sangster had told straightforward stories with something original and new at their core. In the mid-90’s, when the illustration field crashed, I became a mostly full-time writer, contributing countless sketches to TV and fixing movie scripts, and I found myself referencing Sangster again.

A few years ago, I stumbled upon an address for Jimmy Sangster and I sent in the only fan letter I ever wrote. I don’t know if it ever got to him, it was neither acknowledged nor replied to. I’ve come to think of it as a message in a bottle, but I’m glad I wrote it. I did not gush, did not embarrass. I simply said thanks. Jimmy Sangster had taught me that you could take a classic story and tweak it into something new. You could take well-worn characters and make them fresh again. I simply thanked him for entertaining and challenging me with his stories. I said thank you for being a model and lighting my way. Simple as that.

Thank You, Jimmy Sangster.

Tim Lucas has written a wonderful piece about Jimmy Sangster. Read Pass the Marmalade!

A fascinating interview with Jimmy Sangster on Cinema Retro.

Related:
Revenge of Frankenstein Wraps
Frankenstein Has Escaped!

Remembering Peter Cushing

Fond thoughts today for Peter Cushing who passed away August 11, in 1994.

In a backstage shot from The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), “Saint Peter” poses with Melvyn Hayes, who played the younger Baron. The two actors would share another credit —playing different parts — with 1960’s The Flesh and the Fiends.

There was another actor who would “play” Peter Cushing, a stand-in, if you will. Of all his roles, and he played such remarkable characters as Baron Frankenstein, Dracula’s Van Helsing, Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Who — you name it — perhaps the best-known and certainly the most widely seen of all Cushing’s interpretations was his turn as the supremely villainous Grand Moff Tarkin, a character so profoundly nasty that he even bosses Darth Vader around, in Star Wars (1977). When George Lucas made Revenge of the Sith (2005), completing the prequel trilogy that led to the events in the original 1977 Star Wars (aka Star Wars: A New Hope), the character of Tarkin was seen very briefly with the newly minted Darth Vader and the cowled Palpatine, all gazing out a spaceship’s picture window at the dreaded Death Star under construction.

Lucas considered the possibility of using outtakes of Cushing from the original film and animating his lips to new dialog, or even constructing a full digital model of Cushing but, in the end, actor Wayne Pygram was called in, his resemblance to Cushing augmented with prosthetic makeup. He is seen very briefly, and from some distance away, but it was nice to have a recognizable Cushing as Tarkin — first name Wilhuff, don’t you know — bookending the series. A Cushing-like Tarkin — killer cheekbones and all — also appears as an animated figure in the Clone Wars television series.

Peter Cushing is not about to be forgotten anytime soon. Later this month, in the seaside town of Whitstable where he resided from 1959 onwards, Cushing will be honored — after a fashion —with the inauguration of a new pub, The Peter Cushing.

The venue is the venerable Oxford building, once — appropriately — a cinema. I wonder if it ever played a Cushing film, or if Peter and his beloved Helen attended showings there. Bingo was introduced in 1962 and took over permanently in 1984. Now, the JD Wetherspoon chain of pubs is renovating and repurposing the building. One assumes that the decor will include Cushing memorabilia, and hopes it’s as tasteful as Cushing would have liked. The Peter Cushing opens August 23.

An exhaustive and entertaining biography, and tons of background info about the character of Grand Moff Tarkin on the Star Wars Wookieepedia.

Photos of the Oxford building in disrepair, prior to its renovation.

The JD Wetherspoon web page and Facebook page for The Peter Cushing pub.

Bit of a controversy over the naming of The Peter Cushing pub, from This is Kent.

The Art of Frankenstein : Jason Krekel

Peter Cushing’s deadly serious Baron poses with his first creation, played by Christopher Lee, in linocut art, handprinted on a vintage press by North Carolina artist Jason Krekel. It’s one of several extremely affordable “Action Monster Prints” available through the artist’s Etsy shop.

Jason’s love of monsters spills into his other career as the multiple-instrument playing half of a highly original, upbeat, garage rockabilly duo with singer and electric ukulele player Ami Worthen. Known since 2004 as Mad Tea Party, Krekel and Worthen proudly hang on to their band name despite it having since been co-opted by the political extreme right.

MTP’s latest recording, a four-song horror-themed EP called Rock N Roll Ghoul features, among others, a song called Dr. Phibes and an exhilarating version of The Hollywood Flames’ Frankenstein’s Den. It’s available as a digital download or on vinyl, with an EC horror comic-inspired cover by Gus Cutty.

Explore The Mad Tea Party’s website for bios, background info, photos, and links to MTP videos.

Preview and download Rock N Roll Ghoul and other Mad Tea Party music.

See Jason Krekel’s Krekprints and a video demonstration of his lino art and printing process.

The Covers of Frankenstein : Mon Film No. 609, April 1958

Frankenstein Has Escaped was the French title for Hammer Films’ The Curse of Frankenstein (1957). The cover shown here is a composite using a posed studio photo of Christopher Lee’s Monster overlapped with a film still cutout of Hazel Court snooping around the lab.

Published weekly, the French Mon Film (My Film) was a thin, cheaply produced magazine containing short novelizations of mostly current movies illustrated with stills, which were sometimes heavily retouched because of poor printing and bad newsprint stock. Introduced in the Thirties, the magazine had an incredibly long run, using the exact same cover design — a black and white photograph with monochrome overlay of sepia, blue or green, and the title in a filmstrip — for over 650 issues, well into the Fifties, when a different layout and color covers were introduced, though briefly, before the venerable title finally folded.

Mon Film generally steered clear of horror films — Phantom of the Rue Morgue (1954) was a rare exception — with this cover feature indicative of The Curse of Frankenstein’s phenomenal international success.

This issue, number 609 for the week of April 23, 1958, also devoted a few of its slim fourteen pages to Manuela, released in the US as Stowaway Girl, a 1958 film starring Trevor Howard and Elsa Martinelli.

The Art of Frankenstein : Bob Canada

Don’t let the name fool you, Bob Canada hails from Evansville, Indiana. He is a cartoonist and graphic designer who keeps a fine blog where he posts his hilarious illustrations and holds forth, with tongue somewhere in cheek, on pop culture.

Bob’s “all time favorite monster” is Frankenstein’s “because,” he says, “deep down he's not really a monster, he's just misunderstood and wants to be loved and accepted like everyone else. Or maybe it's because he's got green skin and a flat head and throws little girls into the lake.”

Recently, Bob challenged himself to draw 100 different versions of The Monster, and there’s a handful of those already posted. They include a diapered baby Frankenstein, a Fred Flintstone Frankenstein, and a fine, properly muscle-bound Teenage Frankenstein. I got a kick out of the caricatured Christopher Lee from Curse of Frankenstein, complete with Moe haircut, dead eye, pea coat and dangling chains. The bloody background burst suits the character, star of the first Frankenstein movie made in color and originally notorious for its gore.

I’ll be keeping an eye on Bob Canada’s blog for all the Frankenstein goodness to come.

Bob Canada’s blog, posts under the 100 Frankensteins Project tag, and a large Flickr set.

The Covers of Frankenstein : Famous Monsters Fearbook 1971

Famous Monsters “Fearbooks” were all-reprint annuals, this one published between regular issues number 87 and 88, in the winter of 1971.

Gleefully hyperbolic cover blurbs were standard for Warren and Ackerman’s Famous Monsters, getting your fanboy heart racing as soon as you caught sight of an issue on the newsstand. Best Issue Ever was used often enough to become a sort of FM mantra. Variations included Most Exciting, Biggest, Special and Super-Special, the ever-popular Collector’s Edition, and an occasional Super Spooktacular!

The portrait of Christopher Lee from 1957’s The Curse of Frankenstein was painted by the great Basil Gogos. The same character had previously appeared on a Warren magazine cover in a version executed by Russ Jones. Both covers featured the same solid, fire engine red background for the flayed-faced Monster.

Book: Famous Monster Movie Art of Basil Gogos.

Related:
The Covers of Frankenstein: Famous Monsters Strike Back!

Sir Creature

Splendid news has come that actor Christopher Lee, who celebrated his 87th birthday on May 27, has earned a Knighthood. It’s SIR Christopher Lee, now! By the way, last April, Lee and his wife of 46 years, Gitte, were given a Couple of the Year Award by the readers of the German Gala magazine. Deserved honors all around.

Lee’s friend, Peter Cushing, was awarded an OBE, making him an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, and Hammer Films, the studio that launched Lee and Cushing as gothic horror film stars was given the Queen’s Award to Industry for their contribution to the British economy in 1968. That presentation was made on the set of Dracula Has Risen From the Grave, with the Queen’s emissaries shaking hands with Lee in Dracula cape and fangs.

Back in 1957, though he complained that the part had no dialog, Christopher Lee’s career got a supercharged boost with his appearance as the gangly Creature in The Curse of Frankenstein. Shortly thereafter, he rocketed to international stardom as Dracula (1958), a high orbit from which he has never descended.

The photograph here is another stunning portrait from the excellent Life Magazine online archives. It captures Lee in a quiet moment, wearing gruesome over the head makeup indicating crude brain surgery after being shot in the eye, for the film’s climax.

Related:

Posts about Christopher Lee

Happy Birthday, Christopher Lee

A superb, saturnine portrait in profile of Christopher Lee in heavy makeup as The Creature in the 1957 classic The Curse of Frankenstein.

It’s Lee’s birthday today, he turns a glorious 87, and he is still a busy actor. Thank you, dear sir, for a lifetime of entertainment and may you continue doing what you so obviously love as long as your heart desires.

Lee’s photo comes from the Life Magazine archives, a spectacular resource. Go and enter your search words and enjoy the wonderful returns. Try “Creature from the Black Lagoon” and you’ll see rare color photos of the Gillman. Enter ‘Destination Moon” and you’ll see tons of behind the scenes photos.

It’s also Vincent Price’s birthday today, he would have been 98. I have posted pics of Lee — including a wonderful shot of him at the start of his film career, mugging for the camera — and Price on Monster Crazy.

Related:
The Monster: Christopher Lee
Vincent Price and Christopher Lee
All posts related to Christopher Lee
All posts related to The Curse of Frankenstein

The Baron's Birthday

Peter Cushing was born May 26, 1913. I originally profiled the actor here, and this link will bring up all my posts relating to Mr. Cushing.

The studio photograph of Cushing dates all the way back to 1957 and his first interpretation of The Baron in The Curse of Frankenstein. The shot is from the extraordinary Life Magazine online archives.

You're invited to check my picture blog, Monster Crazy, for a really fun look at one of Mr. Cushing's signature moves.

La Maschera di Frankenstein

A superb painted poster for the Italian release — retitled “The Mask of Frankenstein” — of Hammer’s The Curse of Frankenstein (1957).

Curiously, intriguingly, tension is created by posing the hand upside down, as if The Monster had its back to the window it was pushing open. Blood, an escapee’s broken chains and a dead tree heighten the morbid effect.

A wonderful image found on the generally “NSFW” Undead Film Critic blog.

Update: The artist has been identified as Luigi Martinati. Here’s a short bio and another Frankenstein poster by Martinati. 

Related
Frankenstein Has Escaped!

The Making Of The Curse of Frankenstein

Here’s the new issue, number 21, of The Little Shoppe of Horrors, the indispensable magazine dedicated to classic British horror films, mostly Hammer Films.

Featured is a ‘Making Of’ article about The Curse of Frankenstein, released fifty years ago, in 1957, the movie that first brought together Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, writer Jimmy Sangster, director Terence Fisher and the Hammer film crew, and instantly established Hammer Films as the number one horror studio of its time. Among the goodies in this issue is an analysis of Phil Leaky’s makeup work, and a look at the Tales of Frankenstein TV pilot by Ted Newsom.

The cover is by Jeff Preston, with inside art by Mark Maddox, Frank Dietz, Bruce Timm and others.

Here’s the Little Shoppe of Horrors website where you can place your orders. May I suggest you also check out the previous issue, number 20, an important history of Amicus Films.

Related:
The Director: Terence Fisher
Tales of Frankenstein

Vincent Price and Christopher Lee

It’s a wonderful coincidence… Peter Cushing was born on May 26 and, today, May 27, we celebrate Vincent Price (1911-1993) and Christopher Lee (born in 1922). Three horror icons, contemporaries, sharing birthdays on two consecutive dates. Even better, the three men were good friends.

Vincent Price played literate, highbrow villains and haunted men who wore their doom like penance. He also enjoyed sending up his roles and did so often, with glee. In a Frankenstein register, Price played the patchworked, retrofitted Dr. Phibes, and he was The Inventor who put Johnny Depp’s Edward Scissorhands together.

Of his meeting Christopher Lee in 1968, Price said, “I had heard he was very pompous, and I was really a little worried about meeting him. Well, we took one look at each other and started laughing… We find each other hysterically funny.”

Christopher Lee had a similar experience a dozen years earlier meeting Peter Cushing when he reported to the set of The Curse of Frankenstein. Lee wrote, “Our very first encounter began with me storming into his dressing-room and announcing in petulant tones, ‘I haven’t got any lines!’ He looked up, his mouth twitched and he said dryly, ‘You’re lucky. I’ve read the script.”

With that, the two men were instant and permanent friends.

It was a hard-working but happy set. “I was never so content”, Lee said. He would entertain the crew singing opera while encased in head-to-foot monster bandages. Playing the Frankenstein Monster launched Lee on a superlative career as a movie villain, much like it had done his friend and neighbor, the elderly Boris Karloff. There is no evidence the two men ever discussed the role they shared, but the Frankenstein Monster was certainly good to both of them.

Lee, a robust 86 years old, is still very active and very much in demand. Among the blockbusters he appeared in recently, he played Count Dooku, closing out the Star Wars series that his old friend Peter Cushing had helped launch.

Lee’s official website features a Christmas Day video message in which he tells the wonderful story behind his colorful Christmas hat. It’s worth clicking through to hear it.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Lee!

Quotes are from Vincent Price, A Daughter’s Biography by Victoria Price, and Christopher Lee’s very entertaining autobiography, Tall, Dark and Gruesome, still available from Midnight Marquee Press. A new, reworked version is available, now called Lord of Misrule: The Autobiography of Christopher Lee.

Wiki pages for Vincent Price and Christopher Lee.

Christopher Lee sings! One of several clips available on YouTube.

Three I Might Have Saved

Arbogast, whose blog is essential reading, holds forth on horror films like someone shaking the cage to wake the beast within. He’s looking for movement, purpose. He wants to see the little bugger bite back, show some character. His reviews and opinions are wildly entertaining and uncommonly insightful.

In a recent post, Arbogast reflected on our affection for certain doomed movie characters, how their cinematic deaths affect us, and who among them would be The one you might have saved. The idea has circulated like a slow-motion blogathon, and Arbo keeps a list of participating blogs on his sidebar. Check it out for some very interesting and sometimes surprising posts on the subject.

Victims, of course, are necessary in horror films. It is not sufficient for monsters to threaten, lives must be taken for the shock to operate. The doomed must die. The mechanism of horror fiction demands that none survive. That’s how we get on with the story. The purpose of the fable is to rattle us for a couple of hours and then release us back to safety. Sometimes, we’re just rattled a little harder than usual, and we find ourselves mourning a movie victim.

Reflecting on the topic from my Frankencentric point of view, I came up with three deaths I find deplorable. The first is that of the child, little Maria, in the 1931 film.

Maria (Marilyn Harris) doesn’t fear The Monster, she takes his hand and invites him to play with her, and she elicits his first and only smile. Boris Karloff remarked how children were always attracted to the Monster. For the fictional Maria, the attraction was deadly, and all the more appalling that it was a horrible accident. The Monster throws the child into the lake to see her float like the flowers did.

The death of the child was meant to shock, and it did sufficiently for censors to order the sequence clipped short, but still we see Maria’s limp body paraded in town, and the meaning is clear. It is the manifest price of Frankenstein’s folly and it seals his Monster’s fate.

Another disturbing death comes as Bride of Frankenstein (1935) races to its climax. Colin Clive’s neurotic Frankenstein needs a heart, a strong, fresh one, for the experiment to succeed. “A female victim of sudden death,” he specifies, sending out Dr. Pretorius’ lugubrious henchman, Karl (Dwight Frye), with the promise of a thousand Crown reward.

After Karl runs off, mumbling something about his knife, Frankenstein adds, “There are always accidental deaths occuring…”, an afterthought that sounds like delusional justification.

In a very short night scene, fade in and out, a girl walks briskly on street. Karl leaps out of the shadows and throws a scarf over her head. On the soundtrack, we hear a bass drum heartbeat.

Cut straight to the lab, where Frankenstein exults, “It’s beating perfectly! Just as in life!”

As the elaborate creation scene unfolds and the bandaged creature is lightning-struck to life, music cresting, the pounding, unmistakable heartbeat is heard again. It is the song of the dead girl’s heart, carved out and repurposed to power The Bride.

The unfortunate victim who’s demise affected me most was Justine, Frankenstein’s maid and mistress in The Curse of Frankenstein (1957).

As Baron Frankenstein, Peter Cushing is singularly cruel. Colin Clive’s Frankenstein was a nervous wreck, obtuse and blind to the abominable crimes he set off like a row of falling dominos. Cushing’s merit, so to speak, was to be deliberately and consciously cold-blooded. He knows what he’s doing. We see him shove an old man through a railing to the floor below, call it an accident, and then blithely scoop the brain out for his experiments. “He has no further use for it,” he says.

As for Justine, she is not killed purposefully. She is not harvested for parts, like some anonymous villager sacrificed to mad science. Justine is simply eliminated because she has become troublesome, and she doesn’t get the benefit of a quick, painless death, either. The Baron has her step through a door into the horror of the dark room where his disjointed, brain-damaged Creature waits.

In the very next scene, Cushing’s prim and proper Baron is calmly having breakfast with his high-class fiancée, Hazel Court. “Pass the marmalade”, he says.

I hated to see Justine dispatched, and I’m sure it was all the more affecting because of the actress who played the part.

Valerie Gaunt was a vivid presence in Hammer’s two keystone pictures, The Curse of Frankenstein and (Horror of) Dracula. In Dracula, she played the vampire bride fixated on John Van Eyssen’s neck, whereupon Christopher Lee makes his spectacular, gore-face entrance, exploding into the room and throwing the hissing Gaunt around like a rag doll.

I suspect there’s a generation — the first wave, if you will — of Hammer fans who, on the basis of her supporting parts in these two films alone, were quite ready to be Valerie Gaunt followers for life but, incredibly, those two films were the only ones she ever made. Valerie Gaunt disappeared as suddenly and completely as Justine when she crossed that threshold.

Holger Hass, of HammerGlam, reports that Ms. Gaunt lives happily in anonymity, which is nice to know. There were other Hammer heroines to come and conquer our hearts, but I wish I had seen more of Valerie Gaunt.

See Valerie Gaunt in the original trailer for The Curse of Frankenstein, and as the Vampire Bride in (Horror of) Dracula.

The Stamps of Frankenstein

News has come that the Royal Mail of Great Britain will be issuing stamps celebrating Hammer Films this summer (2008). The set will include a Curse of Frankenstein stamp, based on the poster shown here.

Frankenstein philatelic history spans back a mere decade. In 1997, Royal Mail plans for a Mary Shelley bicentennial stamp were abandoned, and — not for the first time — the author was supplanted by her creation. A Tales of Terror set appeared, itself a subset of an ongoing Tales and Legends series, featuring four famous British monsters painted in a vigorous caricature style by Ian Pollock. The watercolors included a bushy-haired Dracula, a split-face Jekyll and Hyde, a fiery-eyed Hound of the Baskervilles, and a subdued, laconic Frankenstein Monster.

The same year, at Halloween, after intensive lobbying by the Karloff, Lugosi and Chaney estates, the American Postal Service issued a heavily promoted Classic Movie Monsters series featuring Universal Pictures’ family of creatures: Lon Chaney’s Phantom, Chaney Jr.’s Wolfman, Lugosi’s Dracula, and Boris Karloff on two stamps: The Mummy and Frankenstein.

Thomas Blackshear II provided excellent portraits of the characters, notably a baleful, lizard-lidded Karloff Frankenstein, though monster fans, understandably, had hoped for paintings by the legendary Famous Monsters cover artist, Basil Gogos.

The USPS distributed thousands of promotional kits to schools. “We are using the fun of these 'monsters' to get kids interested in collecting stamps," said Azeezaly Jaffer, manager of Stamp Services. “The subject matter of these kid-appealing stamps offers employees the opportunity to promote the hobby.”

The USPS would use The Monster again, in February 2003, this time a closely cropped photograph of Karloff in mid-transformation at the hands of Jack Pierce. The picture served as the “Makeup” entry in a series called American Filmmaking: Behind The Scenes.

Date unknown, a curious Hollywood Horror Classic set was issued by the West African Republic of Sierra Leone, with art by American painter Zina Saunders. The collection includes Charles Laughton’s Dr. Moreau and Lionel Atwill from The Mystery of the Wax Museum, along with the familiar Universal monsters, and features the world’s first Bride of Frankenstein stamp. Karloff appears in a scene from Son of Frankenstein.

The new stamp set, coming June 10 from the Royal Mail, honors popular British films, notably the three Hammer Film lynchpins, Curse of Frankenstein, (Horror of) Dracula, and The Mummy. Much has been printed in the UK about Christopher Lee, featured on all three stamps, becoming the first living non-royal to be featured on a British stamp. In a statement published in the Telegraph, Lee says “I suppose its an honour. Her Majesty is rather more recognisable than me, though. In all but one of the stamps I have seen I have my head in bandages. It’s probably a mercy.”

Interestingly, the other stamps in the Film set honor the bawdy Carry On Series, including their Hammer Film spoof Carry On Screaming.

The stamp design is a bit awkward, using horizontal film posters with the Queen’s cameo and postage overlaid and competing with the already busy images. Nevertheless, it’s amusing to see the Queen’s profile sharing space with the once critically reviled Hammer horrors, and Screaming’s pneumatic Fenella Fielding.

Closeups of the British 1997 Tales of Terror series.

USPS pages for the 1997 Classic Movie Monsters series, and 2003 Filmmaking: Behind the Scenes.

A fascinating page of Dracula stamps from around the world, including a full sheet of the Sierra Leone Hollywood Horror Classics series.

Two wonderful blogs: Literary Stamps, and Fantastisk Filateli.

Elizabeth : Hazel Court

No sooner had I posted a birthday celebration for Valerie Hobson that news came of another screen Elizabeth. Hazel Court, the ingenuous fiancée to Peter Cushing’s cruel Frankenstein in The Curse of Frankenstein of 1957, passed away on April 15. An autobiography, Horror Queen, is due for publication on the 23rd.

I am surprised how sad the news made me. I can’t believe how deep my heart sank. I realize now how important Hazel Court was to me. I remember how I sought out her pictures and how her presence elevated so many films that I loved. Her list of horror films is long and storied, with significant contributions made at Hammer Films of England and American International of Hollywood.

In the winter of 1956, Court joined Cushing, Christopher Lee, screenwriter Jimmy Sangster and director Terence Fisher at Hammer’s Bray Studios to make cinematic history, in the form of The Curse of Frankenstein. Court’s four-year old daughter, Sally Walsh, appeared briefly as a young Elizabeth. When the film went out around the world in the summer of ’57, despite being shredded as sadistic and repulsive by British critics, it was box-office gold, and the Hammer era of Gothic Horrors was launched.

Hazel Court was ravishing, “a beauty among the beasts” as one reviewer put it. You couldn’t possibly miss her, of course. Imagine: A redhead with green eyes, and generous cleavage bound in Victorian corsets. She was tagged as a “Scream Queen”, and she did have to shriek off the threats of monsters and villains, but she was also one hell of an actress. When given a proper role, she could make it swing. Look at her beguiling turn in Roger Corman’s The Raven (1963) — see a YouTube clip here — and see how she holds her own in a scene with Boris Karloff, Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, and a desperately young Jack Nicholson.

By the late sixties, Hazel Court was mostly working in American television, and then she walked away and went on to other things. Encouraged by her friend, art expert Vincent Price, she became an artist, another thing that made me connect with her. She was a painter first, then a sculptor of Italian marble. Admirably, Hazel Court was proud of her horror films, always willing to share her memories, and generous in her recollections of fellow actors and co-stars.

Thinking back, there are three brief scenes that instantly come to mind when I think of Hazel Court. She always seemed to be wearing one of those spectacular opera dresses. In The Raven, she exchanges lines with the venerable Boris Karloff, her back turned to him as he fixes her dress. In The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959), she backs up the stairs, keeping a horrified distance from a clawing Anton Diffring, disintegrating before our eyes as his rejuvenation experiment fails. And the most memorable scene, an instant, indelible recall for me, comes in The Curse of Frankenstein, as she prowls the abandoned laboratory and steps out on the balcony…

That’s how I remember the unforgettable Hazel Court, in her bustled, off-the-shoulder dress, holding a gasoline lamp, unaware of The Monster lurking close behind.

Hazel Court's autobiography, from Tomahawk Press.

An obituary in The International Herald Tribune.

Wonderful, touching posts about Hazel Court by Arbogast and Tim Lucas.

A fan page.

The trailer for The Curse of Frankenstein.

Updates:

A recent interview with Hazel Court in a Lake Tahoe paper.

An obituary at Cinefantastique Online.

A rememberance by Tom Weaver on Fangoria.com.

Frankenstein Has Escaped!

Early sixties, maybe '61 or '62, on a lazy summer day in Montreal’s East End. The Orleans, a small, neighborhood theatre about 6 blocks from where I lived, ran a horror triple-bill. I remember the posters crowded in the small display window: A cartoon Dracula with phosphorescent eyes and blood dripping from his fangs, a gingerbread man-like Mummy with pursuers shining a flashlight beam through the clean, dinner plate-sized hole in its chest, and a variation of the poster shown here, an intense Dr. Frankenstein and his haphazard-faced Monster with heads together in extreme closeup. Three films, three cool monsters. All starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. All written by Jimmy Sangster, all directed by Terence Fisher. All Hammer Films.

I attended with two friends, first showing, first day, at noon. Partway through that afternoon, shrill music cannonading, the swashbuckling Van Helsing sprang to the window, yanked back the drapes, grabbed two candleholders and made a cross of them, pinning the snarling, spitting Dracula in the acid beams of the sun. As Christopher Lee melted and crumbled into dry oatmeal, my friend Serge suddenly sprang up, leapt over me, and ran up the aisle and out of the theater. I saw him again the next day, but he refused to talk about it.

By late afternoon, after the three films had unspooled, my friend Gilbert got up to leave. I asked him to call my Mom and tell her I’d be late. I had to watch this again. With a bag of chips for dinner, I sat through the triple-bill again.

That evening, as I straggled home, head spun with stylish Gothic horrors, I knew everything had changed. I had gotten a thrilling, dizzying crash course in the recent, still young Hammer Films history, and I had been made into a fan forever. I went back that week and sat through the three films again. For years to come, into adulthood, I never missed a new Hammer film. I’d see them as they came out, usually at the Strand downtown, and I’d catch them again in the neighborhood, when they circled back in French.

I always loved the French titles. They often seemed to be more imaginative than the original ones. They sounded better, more exciting. Nowadays, film titles are usually translated straight up, and sometimes they even keep the English title, though the film itself is dubbed. That unforgettable day when I discovered Hammer films — and just plain fell in love with movie going — the triple-bill titles were (re-translated into English): The Nightmare of Dracula, The Curse of the Pharaohs and, my favorite, Frankenstein Has Escaped!, a screaming headline title fraught with urgent menace. It’s Escaped! It’s Out There Right Now! And it’s FRANKENSTEIN!!! Maybe it’s just me, but I think those three titles have more buzz to them than Horror of Dracula, The Mummy, and The Curse of Frankenstein.

I always had fun comparing alternate or translated titles. Curse of the Werewolf played in French as The Night of the Werewolf, the Loup-Garou staking its claim to his full-moon time. The Reptile was presented more accurately as Reptile Woman. Plague of the Zombies became The Invasion of the Living Dead, setting the table for George Romero, due just two years hence. Hands of the Ripper was called The Daughter of Jack The Ripper. Terror of the Tongs sounded even more pulpish as Mark of the Red Dragon. The Rider Haggard epic, She, was called The Goddess of Fire, and The Vengeance of She became The Goddess of the Sands. Evil of Frankenstein was called The Mark (or The Imprint…) of Frankenstein. The Mummy’s Shroud was energized as In the Claws of the Mummy.

Among non-Hammer films, Scream and Scream Again, a pretty decent horror film title in and of itself, played in French with the in-your-face title, Release the Monsters! And for reasons I simply cannot fathom, Frankenstein 1970 (a Boris Karloff b-movie made in 1958) was translated as… Frankenstein Meets The Invisible Man.

Monster Brides were given more suggestive titles. The classic Universal Bride of Frankenstein was called The Fiancée of Frankenstein in French. Franc Roddam’s The Bride was called La promise, i.e. The Promised One, or The Betrothed. Hammer’s Brides of Dracula became the more alluring Mistresses of Dracula, and the Harry Alan Towers Brides of Fu Manchu went to the limit with The Thirteen Fiancées of Fu Manchu!

As time went on and Hammer took to more complex and original titles, there was a curious reverse action in French translations. Taste the Blood of Dracula, a satisfyingly lurid title became the simpler and barely blasphemous A Mass for Dracula. Even worse, Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, a vivid, apocalyptic title promising pulse-pounding action was saddled with the exceedingly pedestrian The Return of Frankenstein.

Foreign or alternative titles are interesting, sometimes amusing, but in the end, we must logically revert to the original title, in whatever language that was. Except for The Curse of Frankenstein. That one, in my heart, will always be… Frankenstein Has Escaped!

Images courtesy of Jean-Claude Michel.

The Covers of Frankenstein : Famous Monsters Strike Back!

Christopher Lee’s pie-in-the-face Frankenstein Monster never looked so good as in this painting by Russ Jones.

Famous Monsters Strike Back!, published by Paperback Library in 1965, was the third and last paperback reprint package of articles and photos from Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine.

The strong art was originally half of a dramatic double portrait by Jones of Chris Lee in his star-making roles as Frankenstein’s Monster and Dracula on the cover of 1964's Famous Films No.2. Art directed by Jones with Joe Orlando, and published by Jim Warren, the magazine was an experiment in using stills from films in a comic book-like “photo-story” format.

The paperback version of the art comes off best, uncropped, with sharper reproduction and more vibrant colors.

The Canadian-born Jones was a multi-tasking artist who wrote and drew comics for all the major publishers. In 1964, he was the founding editor of Warren’s Creepy, even designing the title’s distinctive host character.

In 1966, Jones edited the short-lived but handsomely done Monster Mania for Renaissance Productions. The magazine is memorable for its extensive coverage of Hammer Films, a welcome change to the largely Universal-centric coverage of Famous Monsters and many of its imitators. In the late 60s, Jones traveled to England and worked as a storyboard artist for Hammer.

Warren magazine cover gallery. Here’s another one.

Russ Jones Wiki page.

The Monster : Christopher Lee

“It was a case of inventing a being who was neither oneself nor anybody else, but a composite piece of other people, mostly dead.”

— Christopher Lee, from his autobiography, Tall, Dark and Gruesome (1977)

2007 is the 50^th Anniversary year of the release, on May 2, of The Curse of Frankenstein, the film that put Hammer Films of England on the map and rebooted the Frankenstein movie saga.

Christopher Lee played a gangling, spastic Creature, as if every part of him had a mind of its own. The makeup was a mess, but it worked. I saw the film in a second-run house in 1960. When the camera rolled up and Lee ripped the bandages from his face, everyone in the theater jumped a foot out of their seats, the combined effect of the sudden sight of Lee’s leering mashed-potato face and an entire row of teenage girls SHRIEKING on cue. The rest of the movie was watched from one’s seat edge, everyone in the house pumping adrenaline until the final scene unspooled.

It was one of those unique, memorable, communal film experiences. I never experienced anything like it again, with the sole exception of Alien, in 1979, which had everyone in a packed theater on opening night crawling out of their skins.

By the end of 1957, with The Curse of Frankenstein a stunning, worldwide box-office hit, Christopher Lee, his friend Peter Cushing, and director Terence Fisher reunited at Bray Studios on November 11 and began work on Dracula (aka The Horror of Dracula).

50 years on, Christopher Lee is still busy, and we’re all grateful for it. We’ll see him next in The Golden Compass, come December.

Christopher Lee: Official website. On Wikipedia. IMDB page (258 films listed, plus 107 documentaries!)