Bela's 129th

Happy Halloween-time Birthday to Bela Lugosi, born October 20, 1882.

Related:
When Frankenstein Met the Wolf Man

The Posters of Frankenstein : El Fantasma de Frankenstein

An Argentinean poster for The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942) trades stylish art for the American original’s photo cutouts.

The layout is improved, with The Monster’s red head — gaining a neck electrode that looks like a radio knob — fully dominating. Ygor is made bigger, and the crowded cast of supporting characters is simply done away with.

Ghost was Universal’s fourth Frankenstein film and the first without Boris Karloff in his signature role.

Lon Chaney Jr. stepped in as The Monster, with Bela Lugosi’s Ygor held over from the previous Son of Frankenstein (1939) providing series continuity.

Related:
The Monster: Lon Chaney, Jr.
When Frankenstein Met The Wolf Man
Frankenstein’s Notorious TV Adventure

Scrapbook Frankenstein

These yellowed clippings are not just from any old scrapbook. This is a page from makeup master Jack Pierce’s personal scrapbook, circa 1939.

The short article pasted at left (click the scrapbook image to enlarge) documents the first haircut, courtesy Pierce, given one-year old Baby Sandy for her role in Unexpected Father (1939), also known as Sandy Takes a Bow. It was the child actress’ second film appearance in her short career as Universal’s answer to Shirley Temple. “Sandy” , born Alexandra Lee Henville, generated tons of press and merchandising, but she only made eight films and was out of showbiz by the time she turned five.

The large drawing of Boris Karloff in Son of Frankenstein was clipped from Feg Murray’s Seein’ Stars newspaper feature.

Frederic “Feg” Murray (1894-1973) was a popular cartoonist and radio personality of the Thirties and Forties. As a young man, he had served in the First World War, then shined as an Olympic athlete, winning a bronze medal in the 110-meter hurdle race at Antwerp, Belgium.

As an illustrator, Murray did a stint as a sports cartoonist with The Los Angeles Times before launching his long-running Seein’ Stars cartoon series, syndicated nationwide by King Features. Modeled on the Believe It or Not format of a large portrait done in pen and ink (in color on Sundays), surrounded by smaller filler pieces, Seein’ Stars was pure movie star trivia:

Fay Wray spends her spare time making sketches in charcoal and weaving Tapestries. She also collects rare perfumes… Ralph Bellamy was once driven by a dead man!! His car swerved erratically into a field and finally ended up against a tree, several minutes after the driver had died of heart failure!... Jean Harlow has a 15-minute workout on a rowing machine before her dip in the pool every morning.

No doubt, studio publicity departments must have fed stories to Murray. Case in point, the Son of Frankenstein piece ran on January first, just as Universal was rolling out the ballyhoo for a January 13 release.

Feg Murray parlayed his success as a famous “stargazer” into a radio career as the host of an interview and variety show called Seein’ Stars in Hollywood, also known as Baker’s Broadcast. In a celebrated episode, on March 13, 1938, Murray’s guests were Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi.

Karloff performed a dramatic reading of Rudyard Kipling’s “The Supplication of the Black Aberdeen” and then joined Lugosi in a memorable if awkward duet, the two horror icons warbling, “We’re Horrible, Horrible Men”. Karloff’s lines went, “Though the movies would make me a terrible brute, when my makeup is off I am really quite cute.”

Boris, Bela and the Nelsons posed for a gag shot, and here's a YouTube sound clip of that momentous occasion…

A profile of Feg Murray in The Alpha Kappa Journal.

Happy Birthday, Bela Lugosi

Bela Lugosi’s Monster gets jacked up to full power — “The strength of ten men!” — in a scene from Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943).

It’s Bela’s birthday today, October 20. In 1942, he celebrated his 60^th on a Universal set, playing the very part he had famously refused in 1931.

It was a harrowing shoot for the actor. Poor health and the exhausting makeup and costume led to his collapse on November 5, with ten days left in the shooting schedule. A tag team of stuntmen and stand-ins helped to fill out The Monster’s scenes.

Adding insult to injury, Lugosi’s dialog was ultimately edited out, leaving The Monster mute. Without dialog to explain that The Monster is blind, Lugosi’s stiff walk and cartwheeling arms appear awkward. In the photo above, The Monster’s curious, canny smile originally indicated that the climactic experiment had succeeded and The Monster’s sight had been restored.

In a rare moment of reprieve from the difficult shoot, Lugosi got a loving hug from his visiting five-year old son, Bela Jr.

Related:
When Frankenstein Met the Wolf Man

Son of Frankenstein, 70th Anniversary Year

Ygor cowers in the grip of the immense, fur-clad Frankenstein Monster. Horror icons Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi are reunited in this publicity still from Son of Frankenstein (1939).

It’s barely a week now since I announced that I would be hosting a Boris Karloff Blogathon in November, and the response has been fantastic. It’s going to be huge. We already have well over 40 bloggers signed up, with more to come, and there is much diversity. Not only do we have the expected horror and film blogs, we have actors and filmmakers, writers and artists participating. We have bloggers from all over the world who will be posting in several languages.

A Blogathon is a great way to discover new blogs, but you don’t have to wait until November 23 to start exploring. Just click around the list of Scheduled Participants on the sidebar. I’ll be updating the list as new blogs come aboard.

If you have a blog and you want to join the Karloff celebrations, check the Blogathon post for info and send me an email. Simple as that.

When Frankenstein Met The Wolf Man

On this day, November 11, in 1942, Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man wrapped after a month of filming. During the editing process over the days that followed, the film would be fundamentally transformed.

The project began as a vehicle for Lon Chaney Jr., touted by Universal as their new horror star. The young actor had gone directly from his break-through part in The Wolf Man to The Ghost of Frankenstein, taking over The Monster role vacated by Boris Karloff. The new film, as planned, would combine the two monsters, with Chaney, the “Master Character Creator”, playing both parts.

Two days into shooting, on October 14, Variety was still reporting on Chaney’s “double-header” part, but that notion had been scrapped. The flashy twin-role stunt would have meant the use of doubles and complicated split-screen effects, not to mention the wear and tear of heavy makeup sessions on a notoriously impatient Chaney. The actor settled for his signature role as the lycanthropic Larry Talbot and, at the last minute, Bela Lugosi was drafted for The Monster’s part. It made sense. In the previous Frankenstein film, Chaney’s Monster had been given Lugosi/Ygor’s brain and distinctive voice.

Technically speaking, it was Lugosi’s second swipe at the part. Eleven years earlier, he had piled on the makeup for the notorious, now lost test reel for the original Frankenstein. But Lugosi had begged out of the part he felt “any half-wit extra could play”, only to see it make a star out of his replacement, Boris Karloff. By 1942, Lugosi had settled in as a Poverty Row menace and he no longer had the means to refuse a part, even the one he had evaded earlier. “Isn’t it crazy” Lugosi’s wife, Lillian, said, “After turning down the original, Bela winds up doing it anyway… He finally did it because of money. He didn’t do it any other way!” At least, this time, The Monster’s part was a speaking one.

Lugosi, who turned 60 on October 20^th, was not in good health. Reports had him rising at 2:30 AM, soaking in a hot bath and taking a massage to prepare for the grueling, four-hour makeup session and the sixteen-hour workday. Lugosi’s age shows through the makeup. He appears frail and shrunken in the big Monster suit. On November fifth, inevitably perhaps, Lugosi collapsed on set, due to exhaustion. It wasn’t a good day for the film’s cast: During another setup, a horse-drawn cart overturned, spilling Chaney, who suffered cuts and bruises, and Maria Ouspenskaya (as the old Gypsy Woman), who broke her ankle.

Lugosi’s part was filled out by a tag team of stuntmen. Sharp-eyed viewers can make out different people wearing the neck bolts and hinged skullcap in scenes showing The Monster lying in a block of ice, throwing barrels off a speeding wagon, carrying off sculptural heroine Ilona Massey, battling The Wolf Man, and getting violently swept away in the closing tsunami. In fight scenes, Lugosi appears in brief close-up inserts, tying the action together.

Update: Stuntman Eddie Parker has often been credited as Lugosi's stand-in, but careful study of the film indicates that most of the stunt work was done by Gil Perkins.

Shooting had been an ordeal for Lugosi, but the final ignominy was still to come. According to screenwriter Curt Siodmak, The Monster’s dialog “sounded so Hungarian funny that they had to take it out”. It seems late in the game, after a month of shooting, to decide that Lugosi’s accent was unsuitable for The Monster. Perhaps Lugosi spoke his dialog with Ygor’s spirited, lusty delivery, which had worked beautifully for that character but would have been overdone for the stone-faced Monster. Whatever the reason, the solution was drastic. Entire scenes were dropped and, in short sequences that couldn’t be excised, Lugosi’s voice was erased, though we still see his lips move.

Gone were all the exposition between Lugosi and Chaney. Surviving stills show Chaney and Lugosi sharing their stories in front of a warming fire in the ice cavern. Also gone with the dialog was a key plot point explaining how The Monster was weakened, half blind, and dependent on Chaney’s Larry Talbot. As a result, Lugosi’s flung-back head stares and outstretched arm gropes are interpreted as robotic spasms, and the impact of the final laboratory scene is lost: After the juice is turned on and The Monster is re-energized, a shot of Lugosi grinning malevolently was meant to signal that he was back at full danger-zone power, with eyesight restored.

For all the butchering done in editing, the resulting film is surprisingly effective. It’s a brisk and very entertaining adventure movie, with monsters. The graveyard opening sequence and Chaney’s moonlit reanimation is gorgeous. Chaney and Lugosi meet in an underground ice cavern, and go on to explore a wonderful smashed castle set. The local Tyrolean-type town and its festive villagers provide scenes for genre regulars Dwight Frye and Lionel Atwill, and everyone panics on cue when The Monster clomps down Main Street. The climactic wrestling match between the title monsters is a little too short to be entirely satisfying, but the stunt men go at it with wild abandon, Wolf Man leaping and The Monster throwing refrigerator-sized lab equipment, until the dam blows and the monsters are drowned, or at least sent into icy hiatus until the next film.

Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man’s advertising campaign, touting the “Titans of Terror”, yielded a great movie poster, a lurid pulp magazine-style painting of The Monster cranking up a knockout blow against The Wolf Man’s animalistic lunge. The title logo has “Frankenstein’ spelled out in riveted letters, and “The Wolf Man” written in fur. Ilona Massey reclines across the bottom of the image in a flimsy, off the shoulder nightgown.

The original script by Curt Siodmak, entitled Wolfman Meets Frankenstein — featuring all of The Monster’s dialog — is still available in book form.

The film is available on DVD packaged with The House of Frankenstein, or as part of The Wolf Man Legacy Collection.

The film’s very entertaining re-release trailer is on You Tube.

Dare You See It?

Here’s a MUST READ, MUST SEE post, up on John McElwee’s Greenbriar Picture Shows blog, about the 1938 re-release of Frankenstein and Dracula, the legendary double-bill that kickstarted Universal’s second monster movie cycle.

McElwee writes entertainingly about Universal’s all-thumbs attempts at finding a companion feature for their horror classics, mix and matching Frankenstein and Dracula with assorted titles, but never together, to indifferent box office. It was a private exhibitor, Emil Umann, who would come up with the idea of showing Frankenstein and Dracula together at his Los Angeles theater, the Regina. With the first showing, on August 4, crowds were already lining up. Additional shows were added and still patrons had to be turned away. Within a week, the papers were reporting on the phenomenon and Bela Lugosi was popping over for daily personal appearances.

Universal would soon shunt Ulmann aside and launch the “Horror Boys” double-bill across the country — with Lugosi in tow — to terrific business. Seattle reported crowd too big to handle, and there was even a bona fide riot in Salt Lake City.

The house was sold out by ten o’clock in the morning. Four thousand frenzied Mormons milled around outside, finally broke through the police lines, smashed the plate glass box-office, bent in the front doors, and tore off one of the door checks in their eagerness to get in and be frightened.

John McElwee’s Greenbriar Picture Shows is a miraculous blog, always entertaining, crammed with fascinating, revelatory details and always accompanied by superb iconography. This time, we are treated to wonderful We Dare You vintage newspaper ads and trade ballyhoo.

This is one post you can’t miss. Go see, fast, and while you’re at it, explore the site’s archives. It’s a treasure house. You could become addicted, as I am, to the Greenbriar Picture Shows.

Here is the post, The Pair That Curled Your Hair, and stand by for Part 2 that will follow the Frankenstein/Dracula tandem into the 40’s and beyond.

UPDATE: Part Two, Dracula/Frankenstein Forever, is posted, and it's terrific.

Related:
The Selling of Frankenstein

The Covers of Frankenstein : Bizarre No. 24-25

A forlorn Frankenstein on the cover of Bizarre no. 24-25, from 1962. Karloff in his Bride of Frankenstein makeup graces more book covers than any other Frankenstein Monster of the movies. Perhaps it’s simply a question of ready access to a cache of good studio photographs, but I think that the burn effects, the signed hair and exposed forehead clamps make this Monster the most photogenic of all.

Not to be confused with the current magazine of the same name, or the legendary fetish title published by John “Willie” Coutts, THIS Bizarre was an intellectual literary and arts magazine with a surrealist bent, first launched in Paris by maverick publisher Eric Losfeld in 1953.

Abandoned after just two issues, the title and concept were revived by editor Michel Laclos for publisher J.J.Pauvert in 1955 and ran until 1968. Subject matter ran from the provocative to the weird and profane, with special thematic issues devoted to such names as Boris Vian and Arthur Rimbaud, edgy cartoonists like Wolinki and Chaval, and pop culture subjects like Monsters in myth and real-life “freaks”, horror and mystery writer Gaston Leroux, and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan.

In the late summer of 1962, this double issue, numbered 24-25, was entirely devoted to the work of four men: James Whale, Tod Browning, Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. Midi-Minuit Fantastique editor Jean-Claude Romer profiled the directors, and avant-garde writer Jean Boullet handled the actors. The short bios were followed by exhaustive filmographies, including cast and crew, detailed synopsis and, when available, excerpts from contemporary reviews.

The filmographies have long since been improved on, but at the time, it was a stunning piece of research coming early in the new, nascent era of horror film study and criticism. The only disappointment with the issue lies with Boullet’s opinionated “biographies”. He gives short shrift to Karloff’s abilities, essentially reducing him to an interchangeable actor who “owed everything” to the genius of makeup man Jack Pierce. As for the Lugosi profile, it veers to the ridiculous, with the actor, in drugged old age, “becoming Dracula” and living in a house with live bats. Writing partner Romer, famously rigorous, was incensed by Boullet’s sensationalistic exploitation of “every cliché in the book” about Lugosi. The men remained friends, but there were no further published collaborations, despite editor Laclos’ introduction saying that Romer and Boullet were planning bio-filmographies of the Chaneys, father and son.

The 98-page magazine includes 36 pages of photographs. You can see 16 of those pages scanned here on the excellent zine blog. Once you get there, be sure to scroll around. The site reproduces wonderful covers and content from older French magazines devoted mostly to b-movies, science fiction and horror, and mild erotica. If you’ve never seen an issue, you can get eye-popping glimpses inside the legendary horror film magazine Midi-Minuit Fantastique, like this interview and layout on Christopher Lee, and a great photo essay on actress Barbara Steele, from 1967.

Oh, and an anecdote about that issue of Bizarre… The day I bought my copy, late ’62, in Montreal, I went directly from the store to the Cinematheque Québécoise where film historian William K. Everson was appearing that evening. After his lecture, he stepped offstage to sign books and meet people. I went up and I pulled out my new copy of Bizarre Nos. 24-25 with the Frankenstein cover. Everson’s eyes bugged out. He looked inside and stopped on the Karloff filmography. Turning the pages slowly, he said, “This is incredibly complete!”. I offered him my copy, he wouldn’t hear of it, but he had me write down the name of the bookstore for him.

The French literary blog, l’Alamblog, ran a lenghty series of posts detailing the history of Bizarre magazine, with covers.

Happy 125th, Bela Lugosi

This weekend, October 20 was Bela Lugosi’s 125^th birthday.

In 1931, Bela Lugosi became an instant sensation upon the release of Dracula, the film that ignited the first golden age of horror films. Universal Studios quickly followed up with a plan to shoot Frankenstein, featuring their newly minted star. Lugosi's name appeared on a preview poster for the film. A notorious, now lost screen test was made, and then everything fell apart.

One story goes that Lugosi stubbornly refused to play the part of The Monster because of no dialog and too much makeup. Another version has Universal chief Carl Laemmle laughing at Lugosi’s appearance and shelving the project, at least until James Whale stepped in, retooled the script and shot it with Boris Karloff.

In 1939, Lugosi appeared in the third Frankenstein outing, Son of Frankenstein, as the broken-necked Ygor, and pretty much stole the film right out from under Boris Karloff and Basil Rathbone. Returning in 1942’s The Ghost of Frankenstein, this time with Lon Chaney, Jr. as The Monster, Lugosi’s Ygor, in the final scene, had his brains inserted in the Monster’s skull, with catastrophic results: The re-brained Monster was now blind!

In 1943, Lugosi finally accepted the part that had eluded him twelve years earlier when he donned the heavy monster makeup for Frankenstein Meets The Wolfman. It made sense: Ygor’s brains were now inside The Monster’s square head, and Lugosi was able to speak The Monster’s dialog with Ygor’s accent. The part was difficult for the frail actor and he is doubled by stuntmen, often obviously, in several scenes. The final ignominy came when, prior to release, Universal yanked all of The Monster’s speaking scenes. Curiously, Lugosi’s stiff-arm groping, meant to indicate The Monster’s blindness, now unmentioned in the film, became the standard Frankenstein Monster robot walk.

Lugosi played opposite The Monster one more time, as Dracula, commanding Glenn Strange is Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, in 1948.

Frankenstein may have been a footnote and an irritant in Lugosi’s career, but Bela made several contributions to the myth, and he made The Monster come alive in many ways.

The cover illustration above was designed and colorized by Joe Schovitz for Jim Clatterbaugh’s superlative Monsters From The Vault magazine. That issue, #22, is still available directly from the publisher.