The Golem Drive of 1921

September 1921, as a record–breaking heat wave scorches the East Coast, The Golem heads for Manhattan Beach, Long Island.

Ads for the Criterion Theater showing of Paul Wegener's THE GOLEM (1920) were painted on rental umbrellas, a high visibility "stunt" aimed at the estimated 50,000 bathers on hand daily. It was just one of many ambitious ballyhoo efforts deployed to promote the film.

Pitching the film in the Exhibitors Herald of September 24, 1921, Paramount Exploitation Representative Eli M. Ororwitz suggested that special attention be given to promotion in Jewish communities — "(a) sure-fire channel for exploitation" — but not to limit its reach. "The Golem is screen literature." Orowitz writes. "There is enough curiosity for that sort of thing to make an exhibitor rich, if he appeals to the intelligence of the patrons… The story of "The Golem" can stand anywhere. There is similarity between it and the old Frankenstein Monster legend. It is the perennially fascinating subject of mechanism come to life — the inanimate breathing." Even the film's expressionist style should not be a problem, "The Golem brings a sound futurism to the screen. It surpasses the attempts of one or two other screen endeavours, because it avoids the usual Greenwich Village-Cubist hodgepodge." Take THAT, NOSFERATU and THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI!

Through the summer and into the fall of '21, THE GOLEM marched through Philadelphia, Chicago and Cincinnati. Patrons were handed playbills, English on one side, Yiddish on the other. In Cleveland, posters were plastered on street cars, bringing "splendid attendance" to Loew's Euclid. In Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, 3500 residents found calling cards in their mailboxes reading, "Dropped in to see you but you were out. See me at the Regent Theater, Monday."

In New York, THE GOLEM was given special attention for its extended run at the prestigious Criterion theatre at 44th and Broadway, a showcase for major releases. The film was accompanied by an elaborate live prologue, scored and conducted by Criterion manager Hugo Riesenfeld, featuring songs and scenes of Old Prague. The program also included a Buster Keaton short, HARD LUCK (1921).

Paramount Exploitation Rep Fred Green, following up on his beach umbrella stunt, commissioned a full‒sized Golem statue, manufactured by the Brunton Studio from a model by Criterion staffer Louis Gardy. Cost was a then steep $50. Reports indicated "increased business far in excess of this amount". Soon, the Golem statue was being trundled around town, up and down the East Side, parked in doorways or standing guard at the Criterion. A number of smaller statuettes, roughly 3 feet tall, were made for display in neighbourhood store windows. Still smaller, an inch and a half Golem "watch charm" was cast in — yikes! — lead. The toxic tchotchkes were devised by Paramount exploiteer Albert Boasberg of the Washington exchange and made available to exhibitors at $6.50 for 500, and $11 per thousand.

The Criterion's publicity campaign, referred to as "The Golem Drive", proved successful. The combination of poster and newspaper ads, and the accompanying inspired "stunts" translated into serious box-office. THE GOLEM would play the New York venue for sixteen and a half weeks.


Related: Frankenstein Themes in Silent Films

Frankenstein Themes in Silent Films

The Silent Era was rich in Frankenstein themes. Artificial life was explored with Paul Wegener’s Golem Films, four different versions of Alraune and a major serial, Homunculus.

Wegener, a superstar of early cinema, first essayed the Jewish legend in 1915 with Der Golem, aka The Monster of Fate, a lost film, save for a short clip from the film’s climax. Set in modern times, it has the clay giant pulled from the rubble of an old synagogue and reanimated, with the expected results. In 1917, Der Golem und die Tänzerin (The Golem and the Dancing Girl) was a bit of whimsy in which Wegener parodied himself as an actor who plays The Golem. In 1920, collaborating with writer Henrik Galeen and director Carl Boese, Wegener mounted a spectacular telling of the original story with Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (The Golem, or How He Came into the World). The film played around the world, with The New York Times giving it a glowing review and noting its Frankenstein connection: “like the creature of Frankenstein’s creation, the Golem does not remain obedient…”

Wegener’s formidable Golem, hacked out of clay, stomped around in massive boots, foreshadowing Karloff’s Monster. Both creatures harrowingly encountered little girls, but where it spelled doom for the child in Frankenstein, it was the waif in Der Golem who precipitated the monster’s end.

Alraune, a legend novelized by Haans Heinz Ewers in 1921, tells of a child born of a prostitute who was inseminated with a mandragore root, grown from the semen of a hanged murderer. Quite the origin story! Without a soul, emotionless, unable to love, Alraune grows from a child who tortures small animals into a wanton Femme very Fatale who destroys her lovers. The story was filmed twice in 1918, in Hungary and Germany, with much confusion today as to who directed or who played what. As an example, the dubiously reliable IMDB — and repeated on Wikipedia — names Gyula Gal as the Hungarian Alraune, but Gal was a male actor. The part has since been attributed, but still problematically unconfirmed, to Margit Lux, who would go on to appear in Drakula halala (1923).

The most famous version of Alraune came in 1928 at the hands of writer/director Henrik Galeen, with Brigitte Helm as the stunning and glacial menace and Paul Wegener as the scientist, Prof. Jakob ten Brinken. Helm reprised the part just two years later opposite Albert Bassermann in a film directed by Richard Oswald. Helm, of course, played another significant artificial creature, the fabulous robot in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926). The San Jose Evening News of August 24, 1927 addressed her Frankenstein roots, noting, “This girl-machine becomes a Frankenstein, destroying her creator.”

Completing the silent Alraune saga, one of the most tantalizing of all unmade films must be Alraune und der Golem, announced in 1919. It might have been the first “monster rally”. A series of beautiful posters were produced, but the project never made it to the screen.

Perhaps the most popular Frankensteinian film of the Silent Era was Homunculus, the massive six-part serial of 1916, totaling some eight and a half hour of screen time. The story has elements of Mary Shelley’s novel in the relentless pursuit by the scientist creator of his wicked creation. This monster is a perfect lab-made man, a charismatic tyrant who plans the very destruction of Mankind. The films were such a hit that Danish-born actor Olaf Fonss became a European matinee idol and the character’s wardrobe inspired popular fashion. The series culminated with a battle between the Homunculus and a second artificial man created to destroy him. In the end, the Homunculus is struck and vaporized by lightning.

A variation on laboratory-provoked life, H.G.Wells’ Frankensteinian novella, The Island of Dr. Moreau, in which animals are tortured into human shape, was adapted in Germany as Die Insel der Verschollenen (1921). Umberto Guarracino, The Monster in 1920’s Il Mostro di Frankenstein played “the product of the secret workshop”. The film has survived but is rarely shown and no photos have been circulated yet.

A number of films explored the Frankensteinian concept of restored life with resuscitation by electricity or transplant surgery, often to comic effect. In several shorts, gorilla brains, hearts or glands were swapped in, resulting in the protagonist behaving like a monkey. More dramatically, murder victims or the mistakenly executed were given a second chance through electricity, injections or various pseudo-scientific means in The Return of Maurice Donnelly (1915), The Inspiration of Harry Larrabee (1917), The Devil to Pay (1920) and Legally Dead (1923).

A 1914 melodrama, Lola, also known as Without a Soul, had Clara Kimball Young playing an ingénue struck by a car and galvanized back to life in her father’s laboratory. Shades of Alraune, the gentle girl turns into a soulless seductress, dumping her boyfriend and taking up, scandalously, with a married man. When she falls deathly ill, she begs her father to resuscitate her again, but he chooses to destroy his electrical apparatus and Lola dies a second and final death. Variety referred to Lola as “Miss Young’s lady Frankenstein”.

A similar situation with a different outcome was found in the British-made The Man Without a Soul (1916) when the revived title character, after much beastly behavior, finds his lost soul through prayer. The 1920 hit Go and Get It had a criminal brain plunked into a gorilla’s skull, resulting in a hairy missing link character played by Bull Montana. The Pittsburgh Press called it, “a modern Frankenstein, reversing the Darwinian plan.”

In 1924, On Time, a rowdy adventure yarn starring Richard Talmadge, “the dare-devil stunt king of motion pictures”, aka “The man without fear”, included a gorilla brain swap sequence. The story was written by Garrett Fort, who would eventually collaborate with Robert Florey, and later James Whale, on the script of Frankenstein (1931).

The great Lon Chaney flirted with Frankenstein themes in The Monster, a 1925 horror-comedy where he’s a flat-out mad-as-a-hatter scientist experimenting with soul transference, but the most direct Frankenstein connection was made earlier, with A Blind Bargain (1922) in which Chaney played Dr. Lamb, a scientist who, “in his hidden chamber of human experimentation”, grafts monkey glands to humans, supposedly giving them eternal youth. Chaney also appears as a tragic, crooked-legged manservant, the apish result of a failed gland switcheroo.

Frankensteinian themes of artificial life and reanimation permeate popular culture, and many films of the distant Silent Era explored these topics in unusual ways. I’ll be revisiting many of the titles here, in due time, in greater detail as new information and images continue to surface.

I had a great time exploring The Silent Frankensteins over the last two weeks. I hope you enjoyed the posts.

Frankensteinian : Gourmelin's Golem

The Golem haunts Old Prague in the 1967 French television adaptation of Gustav Meyrink’s famous novel. The Golem’s mask was designed by artist Jean Gourmelin, who passed away on October 9. He was 91.

Virtually unknown in America, Gourmelin was a celebrated in his native France for his unique jet-black humorous cartoons and meticulous illustrations in a surrealist vein.

As a young man, Gourmelin apprenticed with stained-glass master Max Ingrand and worked in the field for over twenty years before choosing to devote himself exclusively to illustration, coming to prominence in the early sixties as a regular contributor to the legendary Fortean magazine, Planète. Gourmelin published several collections of his drawings and illustrated books by such authors as Gaston Leroux, Guy de Maupassant and H.P.Lovecraft.

In 1966, Gourmelin designed the elaborate, caligaresque sets for the ORTF’s telefilm of Gustav Meyrink’s Le Golem, directed by Jean Kerchbron from a script by Louis Pauwels, author of The Morning of the Magicians. Gourmelin also created the Golem’s mask, closely based on Meyrink’s description of the creature with large, slanted eyes.

In the photographs here, that’s Gourmelin — center — helping actor André Reybaz, who also played the lead role of the gem-cutter, Athanase Pernath.

Le Golem was as a bold experiment in le fantastique, the producers giving veteran director Kerchbron and his team complete control over the project. It is also remembered as one of the last French TV-movies made in black and white — which suited the film perfectly. Within a few months, the network had switched to full-time color broadcasting.

Working with Kerchbron again, Gourmelin designed sets and costumes for the 1971 TV adaptation of Victor Hugo’s The Man Who Laughs. In 1977, he created the theatre sets for Andrée Chedid’s Nefertiti and he designed the poster for the original theatrical run of Les Misérables, directed by Robert Hossein.

Sadly, over the last decade, Gourmelin suffered from failing health, but he lived long enough to see his work honored in major retrospectives at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, the prestigious Centre-Pompidou in Paris and, just one month before his death, the city of Vendôme where stained-glass art created in his younger days adorn the chapels of two local castles.

There’s a ten-minute excerpt of Le Golem — in French, and unfortunately sans title creature — on Ina.fr, where whole film can be downloaded for a very reasonable 4 Euros.

Update: Here is a brief, 60-second montage where the Golem is glimpsed, pursued by an angry mob.

Images from Midi-Minuit Fantastique No. 15-16, December 1966.

Jean Gourmelin’s official website.A collection of drawings from Planète Magazine, on Art Maniac.

Related:

Gourmelin's Golem in color 

The Fortean Times’ Secret of the Golem.

Frankensteinian : The Secret of the Golem

The August 2008 issue (#238) of the British Fortean Times magazine carries a fascinating and significant article about the Golem of Prague, meticulously researched by Ivan Mackerle.

The legend tells of Rabbi Loew of Prague, in the late 1500s, who fashioned a powerful Golem to protect the Jewish community from its enemies. One day, the creature ran amuck, bringing death and destruction to the ghetto. Deactivated, the Golem was hidden away in the attic of the Old-New Synagogue, the stairs to the storeroom removed and access thereafter forbidden.

Tracing the origins of the legend and a possible basis in historical fact proves problematic.

According to ancient lore, Golems were never built as warriors. They were meant as a test of sorts, an experiment to measure the abilities of their Kabbalist creators. The Talmud names five Rabbis who made Golems, but Rabbi Loew is not among them. Golems were animated with magical words carved into their foreheads or worn around their necks, but Rabbi Loew animates his Golem in a very unusual manner, inserting a slip of magical parchment into its mouth.

Key characters and locations in the story cannot be found in historical documents, and there is no record of the pogrom that would have motivated the creation of a protector Golem. Most tellingly, it seems that Rabbi Loew himself cannot be placed in Prague on the crucial dates in the legend.

Closer examination of the tale reveals a creature that behaved rather un-Golemlike, a “strangely down-to-earth” creature, as Mackerle puts it. Golems quickly grow in size until they become unmanageable, but this one lived quietly for twelve years, performing simple household tasks. He even had a human name, Yossele.

Here Mackerle formulates an interesting hypothesis that, given the lack of historical evidence to support the legend, could explain Rabbi Loew’s unusual Golem. Mackerle’s purpose is to demonstrate that something, somehow, could have inspired the legend. Imagine, then, a man who suffered from a form of mental illness, taken in and cared for by the kindly Rabbi. He suffers from occasional fits, perhaps an epileptic condition. The legend’s parchment inserted in the mouth could suggest medicine taken orally, or the practice of placing of a rag in the mouth during a seizure. Ultimately, the man suffers a violent and very public attack of some sort, a burst of uncontrolled anger, and dies. In the end, the event is hushed up, “to avoid unpleasant consequences for the rabbi and the ghetto”, and the body of the strange man is relegated to the attic.

Whatever inspired the tale of the Prague Golem, the story of its purported resting place in the Old-New Synagogue’s attic has yielded numerous stories of death, or madness and otherwise horrified reactions for its rare visitors. Well warned, and armed with ultrasound equipment and the permits that took two years to obtain, author Mackerle concludes his investigation by climbing the iron rungs to the building’s roof and its forbidden storage space.

Unless the Golem has been long removed — and there are many claims to that effect — or it has crumbled into dust, of which there is plenty packed into drifts among the rafters, the Old-New Synagogue’s attic proves barren of monsters or new clues.

Ivan Mackerle’s article is like a supernatural detective story, intelligently written and packed with details. It’s a wonderful read, a valuable document of Golem lore, and well worth seeking out.

A sidebar article by David Sutton chronicles the Golem in culture, touching on the claim that Mary Shelley was inspired by the old legend. There is no evidence of this, but there is no doubt that the Golem movies of Paul Wegener had some degree of influence on James Whale and the writers and designers of the Universal studio’s Frankenstein of 1931.

The beautiful cover painting is by Owen Richardson.

Also pictured: A statue of Rabbi Loew in Prague, and Paul Wegener as The Golem (1920). Note the Frankensteinian "asphalt spreader's" boots.