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

The Spirit of Ed Wood Blogathon: Dracula vs. Frankenstein

This post is part of the Spirit of Ed Wood Blogathon hosted by Greg of Cinema Styles.
Click through for links to all the participating blogs.

“She used to have fantasies about being a freak…
Two heads, an eye missing, elongated spine.
Anything that was grotesque turned her on.”

Produced by the Independent International team of Samuel Sherman and Al Adamson, Frankenstein vs. Dracula, released in 1971, began its convoluted road to drive-in immortality as an exploitation piece called, alternately, The Blood Seekers and Blood Freaks.

The script, by William Pugsley and Sam Sherman, reads like a sleazed-up AIP Bikini Beach picture. Judith, a nightclub singer, goes from Vegas to Venice Beach to look for her missing kid sister. Her quest is complicated by a hardnosed police detective and a three-man biker gang led by the glowering Rico. She’s rescued from a freaky acid trip by Mike, a simpatico beach bum who falls in with her and solves the mystery.

As it turns out, Judith’s sister was the victim of a mad scientist working out of The Creature Emporium, a beachside amusement park spookhouse. At night, Dr. Duryea sends his deranged assistant out to axe the heads off hippie beach girls. The heads are reattached to new bodies and displayed in upright glass coffins. Somehow, a new type of blood serum would be distilled from these experiments allowing the scientist to escape his wheelchair, the deranged assistant to recover his wits, and even make a dwarf grow taller.

Playing Judith, chanteuse Regina Carrol opens the film with her cabaret act. She starred in several of director-husband Adamson’s drive-in classics, notably as ‘The Psych-Out Girl’ in Satan’s Sadists (1969). Anthony Eisley, who would accumulate credits in B-movies and TV dramas, plays the easy-going Mike. As head biker Rico, Russ Tamblyn, one-time star of West Side Story (1961), was on a career decline, playing juvies and junkies in increasingly small pictures. His fortunes turned around in 1990 when he was cast as Dr. Jacoby in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. The part of Sgt. Martin, the detective, was shopped around to Paul Lukas, Francis Lederer and Broderick Crawford before falling to Jim Davis, a cowboy actor who would go on to fame as the Senior Ewing in TV’s Dallas. The part was meant as an authority figure but, with terse dialog and brusque manners, the character comes off as an insensitive jerk.

In the manner of Ed Wood’s casting of faded film stars like Bela Lugosi or Lyle Talbot, Sherman and Adamson recruited a trio of Hollywood veterans as the Emporium villains.

Director Adamson got a lot of mileage out of the elderly J.Carrol Naish, in a prop wheelchair, perpetually lecturing anyone within range, though hampered by enormous, clicking dentures. Naish had a long and distinguished career behind him, beginning in Vaudeville, through theater, films and television, with two Oscar nominations along the way.

Forties horror icon Lon Chaney, Jr., bloated and in obvious bad shape, hams it up as the mute, axe-happy Groton, reverting when necessary to his trademark Lennie, complete with puppy dog. Angelo Rossitto, whose credits included the silent While The City Sleeps (1929) with Chaney Sr., and the notorious Freaks (1932), played Grazbo, the carnival barker and doorman to the funhouse.

Naish and Chaney had previously worked together in Universal’s House of Frankenstein in 1945, with Naish’s hunchback and Chaney’s Wolfman forming a love triangle with gypsy girl Elena Verdugo. Dracula vs. Frankenstein would be the last hurrah for both men. Though they appear together in a few scenes, most of their work was shot separately, their interaction created through editing. Likewise, Rossitto, though he participates in a climactic free-for-all, is never actually in the same frame with Naish or Chaney.

“You must understand... You are not trapped, but rather you will be spiritually released by what will occur in the next few minutes.”

The absurd climax has Rossitto falling through a trapdoor face-first onto Groton’s axe. Chaney is shot off a roof by the police inspector, and Naish, racing his wheelchair, accidentally decapitates himself when he trips up and flies headfirst into the funhouse guillotine.

Principal photography wrapped in 1969, but Sherman and Adamson were not satisfied with the results and the film was temporarily shelved. Something had to be done to make The Blood Seekers a better box-office bet. Solution: Throw Dracula and the Frankenstein Monster into the picture, and then you’ve got something.

Adamson cast his accountant, the 7 foot, 4 inch John Bloom as the popcorn-head Frankenstein Monster. Bloom would go on to play The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant (1971) and assorted hulks with names like Bruno, Munger, Jimbo and Rhino. He was the Behemoth Alien who wrestled William Shatner in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991).

For Dracula, Sherman wanted John Carradine, a terrific idea, but Adamson preferred his stockbroker, Robert Engel. Berated by critics as a rank amateur, Engle actually pulls off a decent, if stiff Disco Dracula sporting a short afro, a snazzy Van Dyke and Marcel Marceau whiteface. His monotone delivery is made menacing with a booming echo chamber effect, but his evil cackle needs work. If there was anything truly embarrassing for Engel here, it was allowing Forry Ackerman to pick his screen name: Zandor Vorkov.

Now shooting in 1970 as Blood of Frankenstein, the Dracula/Frankenstein material would essentially bookend the original film, with a new scene dropped in roughly halfway through where the Frankenstein Monster attacks a lover’s lane couple, ripping the door clean off their car and carrying off the girl after being shot by policemen.

Naish was hired back to interact with Vorkov’s Dracula, who has dug up the Frankenstein Monster for revival. A lab scene uses some of the now slightly tattered sparking equipment originally created by Kenneth Strickfadden for the 1931 Frankenstein.

Vorkov is saddled with a lot of expository dialog, mostly superfluous, meant to tie the new title monsters to the existing storyline. Among other things, we learn that Duryea is really the last of the Frankensteins, hot for revenge against the scientists who conspired against him. Conveniently, considering the budget, only one of them is still alive. Famous Monsters editor Forrest J. Ackerman cameos as Dr. Beaumont, seen driving his car when Dracula suddenly pops up in the passenger seat and hypno-orders him to get out, whereupon he’s bear-hugged to death by the towering Monster. Ackerman is also billed as a “technical consultant” for the film, though his name is misspelled in the opening credits.

In the new climax, Dracula drives around in his Cadillac hearse, electrocutes The Monster with his power ring, then gets impaled on a wall and turns into a skeleton. But Sherman and Adamson were still not satisfied, and a yet another ending was concocted, one that would pit Dracula and the Frankenstein Monster against each other. Tacking the new, ultimate climax onto the film, however, would require some major tweaking as Eisley was no longer available for reshoots.

With Dracula and the Frankenstein Monster surviving the Emporium bloodbath, Judith and Mike — with director Adamson doubling for Eisley — make a run for it. What happens next makes you jump out of your seat, laugh out loud, and will drop your jaw to floor, all at the same time. As the couple flees, Vorkov’s Dracula points his funky cyclops ring and shoots a beam that nukes Mike to Kingdom Come. In one startling swoop, the good guy hero is reduced to a pile of burning bones.

“All those who would meddle in the destinies of Frankenstein and Dracula will see an inferno bloodbath the likes of which has not swept the Earth before.”

The movie now shifts to an entirely new set, a decrepit house, apparently Dracula’s hideout. Vorkov’s makeup is startlingly different now, eye sockets painted black and a mouthful of fangs (Naish’s dentures, perhaps). In another switcheroo, Shelly Weiss takes over for John Bloom as the soufflé head Monster. Though two men shared the same part, they are credited separately in the titles, Bloom as The Monster, and Weiss as The Creature.

Judith is roped to a chair but The Monster, suddenly moonstruck over the helpless blonde, objects when the vampire tries to bite her. A shoving match ensues and the action tumbles outside where Dracula and Frankenstein go at it in shady woodlands. The sequence is so dark that you can hardly make out anything, the monsters appearing in stark black silhouette. Dracula proceeds to dismantle The Monster like The Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, ripping off one arm, then the other, and finally stopping the relentless Monster by unscrewing its head. Then the sun comes out and Dracula is caught outside, aging, mummifying, and collapsing into something that looks like a pile of grass clippings. Judith breaks her bonds and walks off, The End. For real, this time.

Dracula vs. Frankenstein tries very hard to be groovy. It has bikers with nazi armbands, pothead hippies in ponchos, surfers, and a beatnik hangout with graffitied walls that read “Sock It To Me” and “Society Sucks!”. The good-looking front and end titles by Bob Lebar are done as an animated montage using what appear to be colored photocopies. Music cues are well chosen, with a spooky slide whistle effect when the goings get strange. The film pauses for a love song that plays to footage of crashing waves and seagulls, and Carrol’s acid trip is a silly standout, with hallucinatory, quick-cut inserts of her tossing and turning, hanging upside down from a spider web and running in the surf.

“Nobody but nobody knows anything about the subconscious,
Miss Fontaine... Not even ourselves.”

The dialog has that dreamy, wrongheaded Ed Wood quality to it. Witness the samples sprinkled throughout this review. Flubs abound. Carrol’s brassy nightclub number presumably plays to a packed house with cutaway shots of applauding patrons to prove it, but a wide angle view shows her performing in a vast and completely empty auditorium. Naish, who refers to Chaney as Grogan and Groton, is seen in extended closeups, his good eye scanning the lines as he reads from a cue card. Naish’s character, Dr. Duryea, is called “DOO-ray” and “Du-REE-ay”, and Jim Davis’ cop is referred to as sergeant and lieutenant. In the process of patching, tweaking and hammering the film into some sort of shape, characters are introduced, then drop off the face of the earth, never to be seen again. Carrol’s Judith doesn’t appear overly distraught when she finally finds her sister in zombie mode with her head stapled onto another body.

Many will look upon Dracula vs. Frankenstein as dreck, and yes, it’s pretty bad, but this is one of those films where the outlandish sum is greater than its kooky parts. The old actors, the demented script, the hilarious hippies and bikers, the flood of clichés, the laissez-faire pace, it all keeps you watching, and somehow it gels into a perfect chunk of schlock, to be thoroughly enjoyed when you're in the right mood.

“They want to see an illusion. They do not realize that the reality itself is the grandest illusion of all… And that human blood is the essence from which future illusions may be created.”

The Spirit of Ed Wood lives in Dracula vs. Frankenstein.

Video of the second ending to the film, with Dracula driving his Cadillac hearse.

The original trailer for Dracula vs. Frankenstein.

Frankenstein in Seattle: Lon Chaney Jr. Tribute

I wish I was in Seattle tonight. The Northwest Film Forum is holding a special Lon Chaney Jr. Tribute.

If you’re in the area, it’s a wonderful, rare chance to see The Ghost of Frankenstein on a big screen. That’s the 1942 film in which Chaney Jr. stepped up and into The Monster’s big boots, recently vacated by Boris Karloff. Bela Lugosi appears as Ygor. The NWFF is also screening The Mummy’s Curse (1944), one of Chaney’s Kharis programmers.

The evening's events are hosted by James Morrow, author of Shambling Towards Hiroshima, a satirical short novel about a Forties horror actor, based on Chaney Jr., who dons a giant lizard suit to help win World War II.

Northwest Film Forum: A Tribute to Lon Chaney Jr.

Related:
The Monster: Lon Chaney Jr.

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.

The Monster : Lon Chaney, Jr.

On this date, February 10, in 1906, was born Creighton Tull Chaney. He would be known to the world as Lon Chaney, Jr.

Creighton’s parents were vaudevillians. His mother, Cleva Creighton, was described in contemporary newspapers as a “dainty singing soubrette” and a “ragtime singer”. His father, Lon Chaney, was then a struggling actor. When Creighton was born, Lon was also moonlighting as a rug salesman. Times were hard, and the worst was to come.

In April of 1913, following an argument, Cleva made a botched suicide attempt in a theater where Lon worked as stage manager. The event was over-dramatized in the Lon Chaney biopic of 1957, Man of a Thousand Faces, placing James Cagney as Chaney onstage, in a clown costume, with Cleva swigging poison while standing a few feet away in the wings.

Cleva survived but her singing voice was destroyed, and her career with it. The Chaneys divorced and young Creighton was shipped off to a foster home. He returned to his father’s side in 1915 after Lon remarried. Cleva was never mentioned again and it wasn’t until Lon’s death in 1930 that Creighton learned that his mother was still alive.

Lon Chaney raised his son on the straight and narrow. His grim experiences on the road to stardom made him adamantly opposed to Creighton’s natural inclination to follow his footsteps into show business and motion pictures. In the 30s, now on his own, Creighton attempted to forge a film career for himself under his given name. He would be relegated mostly to small parts, often uncredited. Genre fans note his appearance as a burly guard in a futuristic gladiator skirt in the energetic 1936 serial Undersea Kingdom. Creighton would always claim that it was the studios that insisted he call himself Lon Junior, after his celebrated father.

In 1939, Chaney Jr. gave a searing performance as Lennie in Lewis Milestone’s film of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, but all the acclaim failed to translate into a high profile film career. His real break came in 1941 with the sleeper hit Man Made Monster, a Universal B-movie in which mad scientist Lionel Atwill transforms Chaney’s good guy character into a reluctant electrical-powered killer, his head lit up like a lightbulb.

At the time, Universal’s second wave of horror films was just getting underway. The monsters of the golden age were being set up for sequelization. The missing ingredient for box office stability was a genre star, a name to associate with the new chillers. Veterans Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi had moved on, Karloff to new challenges and increasing diversification, Lugosi to discount stardom in Hollywood Poverty Row potboilers. With Man Made Monster, Universal found its new herald, an eager young actor with a loaded name: Lon Chaney, Jr.

Chaney would essay all the key characters of Universal’s horror stable, including Dracula and The Mummy, whether they suited his All-American bulk or not. He was the first actor to step into Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein’s Monster boots, marking a transition of the creature into a towering robot in The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942). Universal also cast him in the Twilight Zone-type series of Inner Sanctum mysteries. Chaney made one original part his own: The Wolf Man, first in an elegantly mounted feature that was a box office hit even as America headed into World War Two.

As an immediate sequel to The Wolf Man, Universal announced that Chaney would play both monsters in a momentous clash entitled Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man, but cooler heads prevailed — there was no reason or advantage to make expensive split-screen effects for an actor playing two parts under heavy makeup disguise — and the Monster’s role fell to a frail Bela Lugosi, with Chaney carrying the picture as the cursed werewolf, Larry Talbot.

In real life, Chaney was a boisterous, outdoors type, much like the unsophisticated heroes he played. His good-humored if outrageous practical jokes, fueled by heavy drinking, led to constant tension with his frequent leading leady, scream queen Evelyn Ankers, and probably marked him as an unreliable commodity. After the Universal horror cycle ended in the late 40’s, Chaney stayed busy, but only in secondary roles, where he often excelled. He was very funny as a Lennie-type to Bob Hope in My Favorite Brunette (1947), and he played small but striking parts in High Noon (1952) and The Defiant Ones (1958). He also turned in some significant work as a guest on a number of early TV dramas.

Chaney’s relationship with the Frankenstein Monster continued beyond his performance as the title creature in Ghost of Frankenstein and battling Bela Lugosi’s Monster in Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man. As the lycanthropic Larry Talbot, Chaney shared the screen with The Monster in House of Frankenstein (1944), House of Dracula (1945), and the excellent Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948). In that last one, Chaney gamely donned the flattop Universal Frankenstein Monster makeup for a brief, uncredited scene, stepping in for Glenn Strange who had cracked an ankle with a stunt gone bad.

Chaney also slipped on a Frankenstein rubber mask and danced along with Abbott and Costello for a skit on their TV show in the early 50’s.

In 1952, Chaney played a bald-headed Frankenstein Monster in the notorious live broadcast adaptation for TV’s Tales of Tomorrow. I posted a detailed review of that one here.

Ten years later, Chaney played himself on a celebrated episode of Route 66, appearing as both Mummy and Wolfman opposite fellow fright stars Peter Lorre, and Boris Karloff in Frankenstein makeup.

Lon Chaney, Jr. is remembered fondly by movie fans. He dominated the 40’s horror cycle, an unlikely leading man, better suited to playing rugged character parts. He always gave an honest performance, and he was genuinely proud of his signature role as the movies’ pre-eminent Wolfman.

Lon Chaney, Jr. died in 1973 after a long illness. He donated his body to medical research.

Biographical information gleaned from Michael F. Blake’s Lon Chaney: The Man Behind the Thousand Faces (Vestal Press, 1990). Posters courtesy of Jean-Claude Michel.

Universal Frankenstein films available through the Frankenstore.

Lon Chaney, Jr.’s IMDB page.

Tales of Tomorrow: Frankenstein's Notorious TV Adventure

In its early days, television was live. Variety programs were beamed directly to your home like electronic vaudeville, and drama was acted out as you watched, literal live theater in your living room, with all of its exhilarating immediacy and its inevitable flubs and miscues.

There are countless stories of live TV gaffes from the early days. Actors blew their lines, sets collapsed and props malfunctioned right before your eyes. Even the commercials were live. I remember, as a kid, seeing someone faint on camera, a pitchwoman who delivered a few lines in a trembling voice before her eyes rolled back and she slipped out of frame.

Of all the famous blunders of classic TV, one of — if not THE — most often referenced (usually by people who’ve never actually seen the episode) is Lon Chaney’s reputedly drunken performance as Frankenstein’s Monster on Tales of Tomorrow, in 1952. With the storied episode now freely available on the internet, we are able to view the broadcast and evaluate it for ourselves.

In 1951, the fledgling ABC network launched Tales of Tomorrow, the first serious science fiction anthology series, a welcome, grown-up alternative to Captain Video and Tom Corbett Space Cadet who navigated the spaceways in their plywood rockets, bringing raygun justice to studio-bound alien worlds. Tales of Tomorrow predated The Twilight Zone, which would mine the same fertile field. Star Trek’s Gene Roddenberry cited Tales of Tomorrow as an early influence.

The series lasted two seasons, yielding an amazing 85 episodes. The casting was impressive, with established movie stars the likes of Joanne Woodward, Randolph Scott and Veronica Lake putting in appearances. Boris Karloff showed up twice. Rod Steiger and James Dean shared a show in full method mode, stepping on each other’s lines. A young Paul Newman clocked his first screen appearance.

Some of the best SF writers of the time contributed stories and scripts. Theodore Sturgeon wrote the very first episode. Even classics by Jules Verne and H.G.Wells were adapted for the show, to be compressed and simplified into brief, thirty-minute playlets acted out on minimal sets.

At its best, the show delivered tense cautionary tales of nuclear peril and other Cold War fears. On January 18, 1952, with its sixteenth episode, Tales of Tomorrow staged a freewheeling adaptation of what has been called the first science fiction novel, the original, seminal story of technology run amok, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Writer Henry Myers came with solid screenplay credits including The Black Room (1935), and the western classic Destry Rides Again (1939). His interpretation of Frankenstein was superficially inspired by movie versions of the story. One wonders if he bothered reading the original novel. There’s nothing here of Mary Shelley’s, except perhaps for the little boy, Frankenstein’s nephew, William, who will be menaced by The Monster.

Director Don Medford was the series’ anchor, handling over 70 episodes. Medford went on to a fabulous television career, directing such popular titles as Dynasty, M Squad, Invaders, Man from Uncle and Baretta, eventually totaling over 600 hours worth of television drama. His handling of Frankenstein is workmanlike, with a few imaginative touches. When The Monster escapes from the lab, the camera follows Chaney through a door and down a long corridor, lines painted on the floor creating deep perspective, bringing a sudden impression of depth to an otherwise two-dimensional stage. The creation scene is livened with an overhead view, the camera simply shooting up into a mirror. In a scene where The Monster goes into a murderous rage, Chaney is made to rush the camera, grimacing, the gruesome stitched makeup in extreme, unsettling closeup.

John Newland, the restrained actor cast as Victor Frankenstein, would go on to a busy career as a TV director, contributing to Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Wonder Woman and Thriller, notably the Pigeons From Hell episode.

The trump card for the show was the casting of Lon Chaney, the famous monster movie actor, in the role of Frankenstein’s Monster. It would be Chaney’s second pass at the role, having been the first man to step into Boris Karloff’s weighted boots in Ghost of Frankenstein, ten years earlier, in 1942.

The story guns along at a fair clip, logic never intruding. John Newland plays a rather distant and debonair, ascot-wearing Victor Frankenstein. He lives in a foreboding 16th Century castle on some remote, unidentified island with his kid nephew, attended by a butler and a maid. Everything we need to know is quickly exposed in the opening dinner scene with visitors Elizabeth, Frankenstein’s fiancée, and her father, his former teacher. Frankenstein expresses his obsession with artificial life. Elizabeth humors him, dad is fascinated, and nephew William builds his own monster with a pineapple body, banana arms and olives for eyes.

The guests leave and Frankenstein goes straight to work. A couple of switches are thrown, and Lon Chaney leaps up from under a sheet. The bald-headed, split-faced Monster is an inarticulate being, wheezing and grunting, and jerking around in balled-fist frustration. Frankenstein quickly calms the agitated Monster, straps him down on a slab and retires for the night.

Soon as Victor leaves, The Monster breaks his bonds and goes exploring. He terrorizes the butler and maid, then sneaks into little Williams’ room where he tries to play with the child. William reacts, screaming, “You’re aw-gly! AW-GLY!”, which is confirmed when The Monster sees his reflection in a mirror. The disconcerted Monster throws the boy down and exits.

Despite all the commotion, the maid goes back to dusting the furniture. The Monster appears and attacks her. Cut to commercial. In the next scene, Victor and the butler hover over the maid's dead body. Victor deduces that his creation must be destroyed, whereupon The Monster bursts into the room and puts a chokehold on the hapless butler. Victor distracts The Monster with fire. “Wait!” he says, waving an unintimidating sheet of burning paper with one hand, while combing his hair back with the other, “Wait! It is I whom you hate!”.

The Monster steps up on a window ledge and roars defiantly. Frankenstein pulls out a revolver and shoots The Monster four times… right in the crotch.

The Monster yells like Jerry Lewis, “Yawahahoy!”, turns and breaks through the cardboard stained glass window, falling, we are told, 200 feet to the lake.

On cue, Elizabeth and Dad turn up. Frankenstein repents and vows to fly straight, but nobody seems overly distressed by the horrific death of the maid. Moans and growls announce that The Monster has risen from the bottom of the lake and prowls the castle again. “Bullets won’t kill him!”, Frankenstein says, but figures that “Electricty gave him life, perhaps it will take it away again”. The Monster must now be lured back to the lab, and — how’s this for a bright idea — Frankenstein sends Elizabeth and little Wiliam out on the battlements as bait.

The Monster gives chase, everyone runs back to the lab. When The Monster bursts in, he stumbles into a wire trap. Smoke pots explode, Chaney does an electrical death dance and collapses. The End.

All in all, the show is a dumbed-down Frankenstein done on a cut-rate budget. It’s interesting as an artifact of early, live television, but its notoriety comes from Chaney’s bizarre behavior.

To be fair, Chaney was not given much to do except growl and wave his arms around. When he expresses childlike fascination, trying to play with the little boy, and showing desperate dismay in the mirror scene, he acquits himself well. Chaney also pulls off a couple of good, scary scenes. The sequence where he manhandles the kid is very tense, and the scene where he goes ballistic in closeup, attacking the maid, is also effective. The problem with Chaney’s performance is that he breaks character a couple of times, apparently unaware that the show is going out on live TV.

The confusion is most apparent when he’s handling large props. On a couple of occasions, Chaney gingerly handles chairs that were obviously meant to be smashed. He carries one chair across the set, puts it down and, looking at the camera, mumbles something about “saving” it. Later on, he grabs another large chair, lifts it high, then gingerly puts it down and follows up by miming the violent gesture of throwing it down. It’s obvious, at this point, that Chaney was going through the broadcast as if it was a dress rehearsal.

Chaney was known as a heavy drinker. He would tell directors to get their scenes in early because he knew he’d be plastered by midday. His drinking, his legendary roughhousing, and a penchant for outrageous practical jokes earned him a reputation as being difficult to work with. His antics had fueled a difficult relationship with his 40’s co-star Evelyn Ankers and a led to a famous run-in with her husband, actor Richard Denning. On the other hand, John Hart, who worked with Chaney in the TV series The Last of the Mohicans remembered his co-star as a gregarious, gentle and generous man.

Tales of Tomorrow was shot in New York at ABC’s studio on East 66th Street. Every week, after sets had been built, the cast would assemble on Thursday for rehearsals, and again for a final dress rehearsal on Friday afternoon. Then, the whole crew would head across Central Park for dinner at the legendary Café des Artistes on West 67th and return to the studio in time for the 9:30 broadcast. Somewhere along the way, Chaney lost track of things and went on to flub a couple of scenes in the broadcast.

Watching the show today, we can only conclude that Chaney’s antics have been wildly overstated. The whole show is done quick and dirty, and a number of mistakes can be found. Lines are flubbed here and there, and the actor playing Victor Frankenstein seems more concerned with his hair than with a rampaging Monster. I would also submit that shooting The Monster in the shorts rates as, well, a boner.

Live TV was fraught with mistakes and, without the luxury of retakes, actors would constantly improvise and fix on the go, as Chaney does, and he makes it to the end like the trooper he was. His mistakes here are obvious, but they are pretty much run of the mill glitches of the live and unpredictable TV of earlier days. Other episodes of the series had their problems. In one show, a climactic scene called for Leslie Nielsen to pick up a gun and shoot the villain. When the prop refused to fire, Nielsen threw it away, walked clear across the stage, and strangled his intended victim. In an adaptation of The Portrait of Dorian Gray (also starring John Newland) the title painting was meant to slowly ooze blood. Instead, the fake blood spurted violently into the camera lens.

Poor Lon. Very public mistakes combined with a reputation as a boozehound and the vicissitudes of a late, declining career led to scurrilous, exaggerated claims. Chaney struggles here, but it is certainly nothing like the meltdown stories that have circulated ever since.

Judge for yourself. Tales of Tomorrow’s Frankenstein makes for fascinating viewing. You can view or download the entire episode from Archive.org.

The episode’s IMDB page.

An interview with Irving Robbin, musical director who reminisces about early TV, the show, and his interest in science fiction.

An episode guide to Tales of Tomorrow.