A randomly comprehensive survey of extraordinary movie experiences from the art house to the grindhouse, featuring the good, the bad, the ugly, but not the boring or the banal.
Here's another in Universal's wartime cycle of exotic Technicolor adventures featuring Maria Montez, Jon Hall and sometimes Sabu. The whole cycle, which began with Arabian Nights and thus was presumably inspired by The Thief of Bagdad, is considered a milestone of camp cinema within the Hollywood studio system, while Cobra Woman in particular is often considered the campiest of them all. Future director Richard Brooks co-wrote it, having taken sole credit for a previous film in the cycle, White Savage, while Robert Siodmak directed. Siodmak was in the middle of an interesting run of films for Universal that included the proto-noir vampire film Son of Dracula, the noirish Cornell Woolrich adaptation Phantom Lady, and the still more noirish Deanna Durbin-Gene Kelly musical, Christmas Holiday. There's nothing noirish about Cobra Woman, but Siodmak's straight-faced direction, apart from scenes with a chimp in a kilt, no doubt enhances the film's camp qualities. To the extent that Siodmak takes the material seriously, the film probably looks less campy today and more like the typical studio fantasy blockbuster of our own time, within the limits of a Universal budget.
Ramu (Hall) and Tollea (Montez) are mission-educated natives on a south sea island who are about to get married. Ramu's wingman, or third wheel, is Kedo (Sabu), who on his way to the wedding has an odd encounter with a blind, mute mendicant who plays some reed instrument in the minor key that indicates that the man, despite his handicap, is up to no good. This unfortunate person is Universal's Master Character Creator, Lon Chaney jr., who is done dirty here by not being allowed to speak. Perhaps he couldn't be trusted to remember lines for this particular picture, but it's more likely that someone thought his distinctive husky honk of a voice would break Cobra Woman's delicate illusion of ethnographic realism. But I digress.
On her wedding day, Tollea vanishes. Evidence left behind indicates that the mendicant kidnapped her, and that he came from nearby Cobra Island. Ramu embarks on a rescue mission, with Kedo tagging along as a stowaway. Meanwhile, Tollea wakes up to find herself not quite a captive. The mendicant, Hava ("hey-va"), who only feigned his blindness but still can't talk, is one of the good guys of Cobra Island, a servant of its dowager queen (Mary Nash). The old lady explains that Tollea is a twin who was removed from the island early in life for her own safety, but must return to take the mantle of high priestess from her identical sister Naja, who under the influence of the evil counselor Martok (Edgar Barrier) has gone mad with power.
It might have been helpful for the old queen to have sent someone who could explain the situation to Tollea's friends. Instead, Ramu and Kedo reach the island and promptly discover who they take to be Tollea taking an elegant walk, attended by numerous ladies-in-waiting, to her afternoon swim. Knowing no better, and not exactly curious about his girl's change in condition, Ramu promptly dives in to join the high priestess. His assumption of privileges eventually gets him into trouble and before long he's tossed into a dungeon. Luckily, he overpowers Martok, steals his clothes, and is back on the loose. Unluckily, Kedo, wondering what's become of his buddy, breaks into the dungeon, sees a body in Ramu's clothes, and helpfully frees Martok.
Kedo is promptly put to the torture, but is rescued by Hava and the aforementioned chimp after a tense scene in which the ape virtually hypnotizes a guard by threading a needle, giving Hava, who clearly has a rapport with the precocious primate, time to sneak up and snap the man's neck. Kedo is barely reunited with Ramu before they're both recaptured. The pair are slated for sacrifice and are sure to be fed to the resident angry volcano unless Tollea can screw up the courage to confront her evil twin and usurp Naja's power. Fortunately, Naja never had to fight her way to power, and it shows. 75 years later we no doubt would get an elaborate, CGI-enhanced back-flipping fight to the death between the sisters. In Cobra Woman, Naja manages to topple backwards out a window after chucking a spear at Tollea and missing by a mile. It won't be enough, though, for Tollea to claim Naja's authority. She must prove herself as high priestess by performing the King Cobra dance we'd seen Naja do earlier in the picture.
That earlier scene is the highlight of the film. As high priestess, Naja's main responsibility is selecting people to be sacrificed to the volcano. The King Cobra dance starts the selection process. Once the priestess gets the snake's attention and dodges its strike, she's empowered to carry out the selection. Maria Montez does this with gusto, sashaying down the temple runway to point her finger of doom at the predestined victims. Once she points the finger, each pointee tries to run for it -- oh they of little faith! -- only to be nabbed by the rest. We see her select several victims, putting different english on the finger point each time -- Zap! You're going to die! And bam! You're going to die! -- clearly enjoying the hell out of herself. This scene probably had a special resonance for its original wartime audience, since Naja's is the sort of nightmare fantasy of absolute power in a lunatic's hands that Americans were fighting against in Europe. Even now, there's a guilty giddiness about it that tempts you to share in Naja's pleasure, even if you excuse your pleasure as unintended laughter.
The scene repeats itself at the climax, except that innocent Tollea faints before the cobra, somehow more phallic now than during Naja's turn, can strike at her presumably virginal self. This is bound to disappoint the modern audience since it makes Tollea look weak, but we couldn't have the real swashbuckling finish, with Ramu and Kedo swinging all over the place on convenient ropes and Hava tossing Martok into a pit of spears to put the island's tyranny to a definitive end. There's also more stuff with the chimp, proving again that Cobra Woman is a film for the whole family and not just for the gay men who presumably canonized it as a camp classic. I guess I can see what they saw in it, from the beefcake courtesy of Hall and Sabu to the fantastic costumes of the Cobra Island folk, but I assume that the film had, pun intended or not, more universal appeal back in the day. It's definitely silly stuff, but it's also an eye-grabbing spectacle and a comforting allegory of liberation in the midst of war.
From the director of The Devil Bat and The Abbott & Costello Show comes a film that lives in infamy as the humiliating final film of Basil Rathbone, even though he made one more film in Mexico. This sequel to Las Vegas Hillbillys -- I believe the producers had to use the illiterate plural to avoid confusion with The Beverly Hillbillies -- better fits a narrative of tragic decline, especially when you see how far down in the billing Rathbone is, below not only the title characters but fellow horror men Lon Chaney Jr. and John Carradine, who presumably were more accustomed to such work by this point in their careers. It's not merely the badness of this Woolner Bros. production but the mere idea of these beloved actors stooging for second-rate hillbilly actors -- and that's being too generous -- that offends fans of the horror genre and classic cinema in general. Seeing it offered in one of Turner Classic Movies' eccentric moods, I expected something dreadful, and got it. A trio of protagonists returns from Las Vegas Hillbillys, the entertainers Woody (Ferlin Husky) and Jeepers (Don Bowman) and "girl singer" Boots Malone, originally played by Mamie Van Doren but now incarnated by Joi Lansing. They're on their way to Nashville but interrupt their trek to allow the allegedly agitated Jeepers some r & r. Told that there are no hotels or boardinghouses in the small town where they stop for gas, they decide to squat in a mansion recommended to them. This is our haunted house, but it's actually infested by spies for Red China who intend to steal an important formula from a nearby military base. The spies seem to be divided into two factions. Gregor (Rathbone) and Himmel (Carradine) are straightlaced, almost effete characters, compared to their handler Madame Wong (Linda Ho), her henchman Maximillian (Chaney) and his sidekick, Anatole the gorilla. Tension flares up constantly between Himmel and Anatole, escalating from insults to banana stealing and, finally, murder. Into this volatile setting blunder the hillbillys, who stand their ground despite the spies' best efforts to scare them away, and in spite of the fact that hillbillys scare very easily. There's a twist to come, however, that upends everyone's plans....
Hillbillys may be the worst haunted-house comedy I've ever seen. The reason has nothing to do with the performances or misuse of the horror stars, and everything to do with Lansing, Husky and especially Bowman being without doubt the worst scaredy-cat comedians I've ever seen. The singers have no comic timing at all, and while Lansing at least can scream when required, the men seem incapable of emoting in any way, and Duke Yelton's script leaves them helpless like fish on a haunted beach. Here's his idea of something either funny or scary. Jeepers tries to soothe his alleged nerves by watching some television. Luckily for him, some station is showing a performance by Merle Haggard. The spies are able to interfere with the broadcast, so that Haggard's singing is intercut with random shots of Rathbone, Chaney, Carradine and Ho staring at the camera or making faces, while Bowman tries to indicate in his stunted way that he's frightened. Maybe a laugh track would have helped.
Of the horror men, Carradine probably does the best with what he's given. He gets to have mood swings from his mounting rage at Chaney and the gorilla to his friendly, familiar banter with Rathbone. One of the few interesting things about the picture is the way Rathbone and Carradine seem to be competing over who can underplay better in their scenes together. Carradine in particular is unusually relaxed and casual in those moments, and the veteran actors succeed, at this if at nothing else, in convincing you that Gregor and Himmel are longtime partners and friends for whom this preposterous mission is just another day on the job. By comparison, Chaney is on autopilot at best, and at worst has a pathetic scene when Maximillian, in all the actor's sodden, grizzled splendor, infiltrates the military base and must convince a talkative janitor that he's a scientist with high security clearance. It's hard to tell whether his obvious unfitness for the task was meant to be a joke in a comedy picture or not, but Chaney's actually a sadder sight than Rathbone for most of the picture.
While most viewers will resent the lack of comedy or terror in Hillbillys, the producers seemed most concerned that audiences would think there wasn't enough music. Thus, after the spies are defeated, we get a square-up reel that finds the Hillbillys finally in "Nashville" hosting a variety show with guest performances by Haggard and other possibly-popular singers of the moment, as well as a comedy song by "the Great Jeepers," all before a stock-footage audience, apart from occasional insets of about a dozen people. Because it's a performance setting, the echo-chamber effect you get in all the film's musical numbers -- including Lansing's pathetic "Beautiful Dresses," in which she's supposed to be an 18th century aristocrat in a bouffant hairdo -- isn't as glaring, but this musical epilogue is strictly for country-western fans of the old school. For the rest of us, it simply keeps a terrible film going for another twelve minutes or so.
Tom Keene was RKO's cowboy star during the Pre-Code era. He made some A pictures but quickly settled into B stardom before sinking further gradually, from RKO to Monogram by the 1940s. For some reason he changed his stage name to Richard Powers later that decade. He used that name steadily to the end of his career, but one fan of Thirties cowboys saw value in the name abandoned by the man born George Duryea. Such fame as Keene has today is owed to his employment by Ed Wood, first in a failed TV pilot, The Crossroads Avenger, and later in Plan 9 From Outer Space, in which he and Gregory Wolcott have an epic confrontation with Eros the alien. Yet here's Tom Keene in Otto Brower's Scarlet River hobnobbing with Myrna Loy, Bruce Cabot and other studio players in an RKO commissary. This is more a movie-movie than a true western, with Keene playing a thinly disguised version of himself, or his star self: a cowboy actor named Tom. The modern world's encroaching on the old west and director Edgar Kennedy is having a hard time finding pristine locations for his latest horse opera. This is illustrated in the trick opening, the dialogue of a pioneer couple, Keene as the husband, interrupted by a honking automobile. Another location is disrupted by cross-country runners. Aren't the Los Angeles Olympics over by now? the crew wonders. Finally a ranch is found far from the cares and snares of 1933, but there's a serpent in this eden -- a foreman who at one moment courts the pretty young owner, whose younger brother idolizes him, and in the next schemes with a crook to defraud her out of the ranch. He squares these contradictory tactics in his mind by taking for granted that the girl will marry him. This is Creighton Chaney in his fifth movie role as an adult, two years before he dares claim the mantle, or at least the name, of his much-mourned father. Creighton is 27 years old, his frame and his voice less husky than we know them, but you still know his character doesn't stand a chance with the girl, if only because this is a Tom Keene picture. It's not as if Keene is a matinee idol -- far from it, it seems to me -- but young Chaney is still very green. He can't really project either charisma or menace, so the foreman ends up a subordinate villain, his conflicted motives leading him to confront and get killed by the principal heavy when that scoundrel threatens the heroine. Earlier in the picture, Creighton is the butt of the film's great joke. Usually when westerns send up Hollywood they hypocritically make Hollywood the other, the hero becoming an authentic westerner who shows up the dude actor. In Scarlet River the gag is that Tom the cowboy actor both talks the talk and walks the walk, showing up the real cowboys. He's a better cowboy than Creighton the full-time rancher. In one scene Tom's wandered away from the set and director Kennedy challenges Chaney to do the classic taking-control-of-the-runaway-stagecoach stunt. Proud Creighton, already jealous of the girl's attention to the star, assumes himself capable, but ends up having to take the classic Yakima Canutt dive between the rows of horses to escape trampling. More accurately, I guess, Canutt himself takes the dive, as he does when Tom reappears to prove his superiority by "doing his own stunt." Canutt's an invisible man, however -- though he has a bit role in his own right -- while the kiddies were supposed to believe in Keene's own miraculous skills. You're left wondering how seriously the film takes itself, especially when Tom plays the moral-exemplar film to the hilt. Chronologically this picture should be part of the Pre-Code Parade, but it's a movie in which Tom Keene spanks a teenage boy for smoking cigarettes. So Scarlet River is working its own trail while the parade passes by, and the director is happy as long as no one marches in front of his camera. Historically this is one of those historical-footnote pictures in a trivial way. It's not quite on the level of Clark Gable playing the heavy in a William Boyd movie, but Lon Chaney Jr. definitely looms much larger in the collective moviegoing consciousness than Tom Keene does, and the retroactive disproportion of their roles gives Scarlet River a slight psychotronic pathos, as does our knowledge of their respective fates. Plan 9 is one thing, Dracula vs. Frankenstein another. Who did fare better in the end?
I could understand someone wanting to make a movie in the style or spirit of Ed Wood in our time, after his posthumous canonization as a cinematic outsider artist and long after he made the films that made his name. What's harder to fathom is someone wanting to make a film in the style or spirit of Ed Wood back in 1956, when Wood himself was toiling thanklessly behind the camera. Of course, I'm sure that comparisons with the likes of Wood were the last thing the producers of The Black Sleep wanted at the time. Posterity makes its own judgments, however, and comparisons between Reginald Le Borg's all-star poverty row horror film and the Wood canon are not necessarily flattering to Le Borg. To be fair, the resemblances between Black Sleep and a Wood film are a matter of common influences, not of any conscious or unconscious imitation by Le Borg, producer Howard W. Koch or writer John C. Higgins. The common reference point is the poverty row horror cycle of the 1940s, the films of Monogram and PRC, though Black Sleep is ambitious enough to beg comparisons with Val Lewton's more upscale B productions, and Le Borg himself directed for Universal toward the bitter end of that studio's great horror cycle. While Wood looks forward, adding more sci-fi elements to the poverty-row formula, Black Sleep looks backwards. It's a period piece in the manner of House of Wax and The Mad Magician, not to mention Lewton's Body Snatcher and Bedlam. But at heart it's a monster rally in the late Universal style, only with has-been horror stars as the real attractions, rather than the monsters they play.
A young doctor (Herbert Rudley) is condemned to death for a murder he did not commit, but is saved from the gallows by a fellow physician, Sir Joel Cadman (Basil Rathbone). Dr. Ramsay doesn't know that he will live; Cadman only promises him a narcotic so he won't disgrace himself. Soon, however, he awakens in his coffin to find Cadman and Udu the gypsy (Akim Tamiroff) leering at him. Cadman had administered nind andhera, the "black sleep" drug that simulates death, and then claimed Ramsay's body. He has done this because Ramsay, a promising surgeon, has skills Cadman needs for his own experiments on the human brain. Like many a mad doctor of the 1940s, Cadman has a sick wife and wants to cure her. He must try different brain surgery techniques on live human subjects before choosing a procedure. The earlier experiments, as Ramsay discovers to his mounting horror, have not gone well.
The Black Sleep is probably best known as the last film Bela Lugosi completed before his death. It was Lugosi's comeback after his highly-publicized drying-out from drug addiction, but he was clearly cast for name value, as a matter of exploitation. His role as a mute servant -- a victim of one of Cadman's experimental surgeries -- wasn't exactly a vote of confidence in Bela by the producers. Lugosi himself admitted in an interview that even without lines it was a struggle to get through the picture due to his age and ailments. He shuffles sadly through the picture, sometimes vacantly, though there are occasional reminders that he's actually giving a performance. He uses pantomime to relay information to Rathbone, and in a few shots the indulgent director invites him to steal scenes. Here's an example:
This is supposed to be Tamiroff's scene, as you can tell from the setup, but note how Le Borg keeps the upper right corner of the screen open over Tamiroff's shoulder so we can see Bela respond to the tale the gypsy's spinning. Lugosi doesn't do much, scratching his chin every so often, but moving at all while Tamiroff talks is scene-stealing -- and the theft is more blatant now when, with no offense intended to a great character actor, no one is interested in Tamiroff when the moribund Lugosi's on the screen.
By comparison, Lon Chaney Jr. is sadly docile as another mute, though he most likely does exactly what the director asked of him. Creighton gets a weird backstory explaining how Mongo, one of the insane inmates, was once Dr. Monroe, a colleague of Cadmon's who ends up one of his experimental subjects after suffering a stroke. Cadmon actually cured Monroe's paralysis but destroyed his reason. Monroe's daughter lives at Cadmon's house and works as an assistant nurse, despite her dad's newfound urge to kill her. For some reason, only Daphne (Phyllis Stanley), Cadmon's head nurse, can control Mongo. Her voice reduces him from mania to a crestfallen sulk that probably came easily to Chaney. He'd gone mostly without dialogue in The Indestructible Man, released in the same year, arguably a career trough for the actor. Both better and worse were in the future for him.
Mongo's troubles are more described than demonstrated, and The Black Sleep works as if the producers thought it sufficient to show the old horror stars to jolt the audience or tickle their nostalgia bones. Once it becomes clear that Lugosi and Chaney -- not to mention Rathbone, who may have modeled his cold, stiff performance on The Body Snatcher's Henry Daniell -- are rather boring, Le Borg takes us into Dr. Cadmon's dungeon, where our hero discovers more failed experiments. One is the very man the good doctor was accused of killing; instead, Cadmon has turned him into Tor Johnson -- I really should have screencapped the ID photo of a toupeed Tor as this character's former civilized self, as it's one of the funniest sights in the picture. Johnson can hardly make an impression, however, once Le Borg unleashes John Carradine, who has been vivisected into believing that he is the Crusader king Bohemund, awaiting news of the fall of Jerusalem. Long John was fresh from the set of The Ten Commandments and has prophetic fury to spare here, though contemporary viewers would most likely have been reminded of the old man who'd been guarding Jack Benny's vault since the Civil War. You see, the further back in time you think you're in, the scarier rather than funnier it is. Current viewers who don't know Jack Benny will more likely believe that Le Borg sent Carradine onto the set and told him to wing it.
Everything breaks down once our hero accidentally leaves a key to the dungeon where Tor, though blind, can reach it. While Tor takes the initiative, Carradine naturally assumes leadership of the breakout; he's a king, after all! These two, along with a laughing lady covered with random tufts of hair and a disfigured dude whose makeup figured prominently in the advertising, run amok on the upper level, Carradine bopping first Daphne, then Mongo on the head in regal rage. It takes three lunatics to drag the mighty Mongo down, sans any payoff his backstory may have made you expect, while Cadmon, carrying his sick wife, takes a dive off a railing-less stairwell. Scotland Yard takes over soon afterward, and while Tamiroff and Lugosi are taken alive, the fate of the more dangerous lunatics is left unclear. Maybe someone had a sequel in mind, since Tamiroff reminds the detectives that like his feline namesake he may have nine lives. Carradine and Tor Johnson rampaging through the Victorian countryside: who wouldn't pay to see that???
While The Black Sleep has superficial resemblances to an Ed Wood film -- Bela, Tor, cheap sets -- it lacks any of Wood's naive authenticity. Wood's films are dramatic in their incompetence and by virtue of that incompetence bear an unmistakable auteurial stamp. They are as much about the struggle behind the camera to render his vision on film or speak through his actors as they are about their stories. There's no such struggle in The Black Sleep, and thus no drama worth seeing, not to mention no horror worth remembering. Koch, Higgins and Le Borg seem to have believed that their film could make itself if they assembled all the pieces on screen that had worked in the past. They depended on our thrill of recognition of the old stars, the old situations -- as if they thought the audience would make the film work. Technically they outclass Wood easily, but unlike him, they made a completely soulless horror film. That may sound horrific in its own right, but not in any entertaining way.
Raoul Walsh's High Sierra is my favorite Humphrey Bogart movie. The first of Bogart's 1941 breakthrough pictures that made him a leading-man star, it's overshadowed by the other one, The Maltese Falcon. So successful was Falcon that Warner Bros. stopped making films of Dashiell Hammett's novel after that third try. The studio did not retire W. R. Burnett's source novel for High Sierra, however. Walsh himself put it in western dress as Colorado Territory in 1948, and seven years later Stuart Heisler brought the story back into the 20th century with a brand new title that suggests something closer to despair than the tragic grandeur of the original movie. Admittedly, the High Sierra story could benefit from color and Cinemascope in ways not obviously beneficial to The Maltese Falcon. While the location work often looks good, Heisler lack's Walsh's more poetic sensibility and his feel for atmosphere. He makes a mistake right out of the gate, dispensing with the opening scene in which Roy Earle, an aging Dillinger type, is released from prison. In the original, you immediately get the contrast between imprisonment and the freedom that matters so much to Earle -- not to mention the mockery of freedom resulting from his surprise pardon, engineered only so he can take part in a hotel heist. Heisler's film opens with Earle already on the road to the tourist camp where his partners await him. Blame that on the script or on studio editing, but Heisler lacks visual flare. He usually stages scenes in long shots that emphasize the wide screen in a way that makes the sets, particularly the criminals' quarters, look oversized and artificial. The color throughout is overly bright and garish. The most interestingly thing Heisler does occasionally is tilt his camera, but you get the impression that he does that mainly so he can fit the heads of tall actors into shots where other performers are laying down. That and the actors are what you'll most likely remember about this film.
The actors face a greater challenge than Heisler. The biggest challenge faces Jack Palance, the remake's Roy Earle. I Died comes from the brief period when Hollywood contemplated making Palance not just a star but a leading man, maybe a Bogart for his time. He's just a little too young for the role, however -- bear in mind that Bogart himself was made to look older to play Earle. Palance is too strange a figure with his height and his angular face to match Bogart's everyman gravitas -- in his dark suits in the film's bright settings he becomes something like a piece of abstract animation. There's an odd serenity about him, when he isn't shooting people or keeping his punk partners in line, exemplified by his line, "I'm not angry at anybody." Maybe coldness is the word I'm looking for, but his co-star is partly to blame for that. If Palance is no replacement for Bogart he's at least an honorable alternative, but in place of High Sierra's Ida Lupino I Died casts Shelley Winters, and it's game over right there. If Palance seems too young for his part Winters definitely seems too old for the role Lupino played. She's too intense, compared to Lupino's slow burn, yet without achieving any real chemistry with Palance. I suppose her performance does help you understand why this film's Earle is initially more interested in the clubfooted but pretty Velma (Lori Nelson replaces Joan Leslie), whose surgery he pays for only to be rebuffed by the shallow girl. But you believed it anyway the first time, while it's harder to understand Earle's attraction to the Winters character. You really shouldn't have that problem watching this story.
Otherwise, this film is a feast of familiar faces, from Lon Chaney Jr. having an easy time (and a good scene) as a bedridden, boozing gangster to Lee Marvin implausibly cast as a mere "punk" whom Palance pistol-whips in one of the few scenes more impressively staged here than by Walsh, to fleeting glances of Warners prospects Dennis Hopper and Nick Adams. The cast deserves a better film than Heisler made, and the idea of remaking High Sierra with modern movie technology wasn't a bad one. But if Heisler was just going to plant Palance in soundstage mountains during the climax while the second unit romps on the real mountain, you can't help asking why anyone bothered.
Can you imagine a time when pro football was considered nearly as disreputable as professional wrestling? Look no further than the fall of 1932 and Dudley Murphy's film for RKO, a Pre-Code bromance between college football stars Joel McCrea and William Gargan in which McCrea's decision to go pro is the wrong turn in his life. Back then if you played for pay it proved your low character, with high-profile exceptions like iconic "Galloping Ghost" Red Grange, whose experiences in the pro game may have inspired this collaboration between four screenwriters and Robert Benchley, who apparently wrote his own lines for his comedy-relief bits as a drunk or simply confused radio broadcaster. McCrea washes out in the pros, despite the superiority implicit in his remark to Walter Catlett, a high-pressure promoter, that his eleven is "good for a pro team." He's also had his fill of the corruptions of pro sports, from Catlett's urging that he put some showmanship into his play to the inevitable invitation to throw a game. McCrea's time at Dartmouth left him unprepared for a real career, and by the time he quits football the businessmen who wanted to give the sports celebrity a job have forgotten him. Fortunately, Gargan still longs for the old partnership and hires McCrea as a columnist for the sports section he now edits. Of course a dame comes between them, the sports department staff artist (Marian Marsh), Gargan's girl turned McCrea's. But McCrea feels guilty about two-timing his pal and quits the girl and the job. There's nothing left for him but to take up Catlett's offer, formerly spurned, of a wrestling career. It probably tells you something about pro football in 1932 that a team owner is also a wrestling promoter; this film has the XFL beat by something like seventy years.
Something must have happened to put pro wrestling in the public eye, because some cities had Sport Parade and John Ford's Flesh, the legendary Wallace Beery wrestling picture, playing at the same time. Both films share a shocked horror at the thought that wrestling bouts are fixed and a hero who rebels out of pride against having to do the job in the big match. Here the assumption is that pro wrestling is fixed because people are dumb enough to bet on it. As far as Gargan is concerned McCrea has humiliated Dartmouth by becoming a wrestler with a collegiate gimmick, and a group of alumni confront McCrea and warn him not to wear the sacred D on his ring robe. But Gargan's attitude is based on his assumption that McCrea will do the job; when it becomes clear that McCrea's fighting to win all is forgiven, and when he sees Marsh's faith in McCrea he realizes that she's rightfully McCrea's girl. McCrea officially gives up 15 pounds to his antagonist but in the flesh it looks like more. He clearly yields to a stuntman for the more elaborate work but clearly takes some bumps himself. And here's something you probably didn't know, courtesy of the Spokane Spokesman-Review.
Chaney was under contract to RKO at this time and had appeared with McCrea in Bird of Paradise earlier in 1932. Whether this entitles him to "uncredited technical advisor" billing, let history judge.
Dudley Murphy is best known for the avant-garde silent short Ballet Mecanique and the Paul Robeson showcase The Emperor Jones. If that partial filmography promises an eccentric feature, Murphy fulfills the promise. He proves fond of gimmicky transitions, most notably a bit where the camera dollies in to a picture of Catlett on a barroom wall, and the picture comes to life to start the next scene. Murphy really gets ambitious in the big wrestling scene, filmed either in a big arena or a convincing studio facsimile. He shoots from all angles, moves the camera freely, and really shows off with a topsy-turvy POV shot as McCrea tumbles across the mat to escape from a submission hold. He also stops the show briefly for a trip to a Cotton Club-type joint with a "savage" dance number seen from a drunkard's multiple-perspectives, almost a cross between Busby Berkeley and Marcel Duchamp. Murphy's showiness is in sync with RKO's Pre-Code tendency to cartoonishness, as is Benchley's irrelevant patter, but he also keeps the film moving at a brisker pace than many Radio Pictures from the period. It almost has the snap of a Warner Bros. picture. Among Pre-Codes in general, it seems unusual for emphasizing beefcake over cheesecake, from a football-team shower scene with naked buttocks in the background to McCrea grappling in some tight and tidy whiteys. You get your racism when a black man's head is rubbed for luck. You get your homophobia when two flaming fairies leave the wrestling arena in disgust at the antics of the brutes. And you get lots and lots of drinking, including from McCrea, a year before Repeal. It has its moments, and on the other hand it's probably less than the sum of its parts, but good or bad Sport Parade looks like an indispensable part of the Pre-Code filmography.
One of the first cinematic versions of the Tombstone legend, Allan Dwan's movie takes advantage of still-widespread unfamiliarity with the Wyatt Earp story to take giant liberties with it. We're already dealing with a remake, as Stuart N. Lake's biography, based partly on self-serving interviews with Earp, had already been put on film just five years earlier. Dwan's film is an improvement in that it calls Earp by his right name instead of "Michael Wyatt." That seems to be about the end of its fidelity to history. Some Western historians claim that Lake's book is a whitewash of Earp, but Sam Hellman's script pretty much tears Earp down completely and puts up a new streamlined structure in his place. It relates to history only to the extent that a man named Wyatt Earp did some shooting of folks in the town of Tombstone, but it gets lost almost as soon as you ask who he shot. Consider: this is a Wyatt Earp film in which the name Clanton is never spoken. Since then the Clantons have become an inextricable part of the Tombstone legend, but the story still wasn't well known in 1939 despite Lake's publicity, so Twentieth Century-Fox could get away with creating an almost entirely original cast of villains for Earp to dispatch. Instead of a gang of "Cowboys" lurking outside town to rustle cattle and hoorah the place every so often, Frontier Marshall roots the Tombstone evil in the Palace of Pleasure saloon, whose proprietor Ben Carter is in cahoots with a gang of stagecoach robbers led by Curley Bill (Joe Sawyer), one of the few authentic names in the story. The robberies recede into the background, however, as the script focuses on Carter's feud with the more refined Bella Union, which can hire high-class entertainment like "greatest comedian in the world" Eddie Foy (Eddie Foy Jr.). Attempting to keep the peace is Earp (Randolph Scott), who earns his star by volunteering to subdue the drunken Injun Charlie when the current marshal (Ward Bond) chickens out. Wyatt has come to town alone, without brothers or wife, and stays to impose order despite the machinations of Carter and a spiteful saloon girl (Binnie Barnes). Complicating matters is the arrival of temperamental and tubercular gunman Doc "Halliday" (Cesar Romero -- and I didn't misspell "Holliday," the movie did), a man with a fondness for handkerchief duels and a general death wish. An appalling amount of screen time is dedicated to the efforts of Halliday's long-suffering wife (Nancy Kelly) to recall the murderous lunger to his original vocation -- not merely dentistry but a full-scale general practice, including on-the-fly surgery. The climax of the picture is Doc's rally to perform life-saving surgery on a bartender's son accidentally shot by Earp. Following this redemptive triumph, Halliday strides out of the Bella Union and is instantly killed by Curley Bill, who informs Wyatt that he can be found at the O.K. Corral, about three doors down from the saloon. So Wyatt Earp fights the famous gunfight by himself, though help arrives at the end from an unexpected source. As the curtain falls, law and justice triumph, though one character notes that Tombstone is no longer truly safe, now that the Palace of Pleasure has been replaced by a savings bank.
The challenge for a historian or history buff when faced with something like Frontier Marshal is to distance oneself from history and judge the film on purely dramatic and cinematic terms. Cinematically, Dwan directs some crisp action and the film has some nice production values overall. But the script is a disaster that leaves Earp a bystander for much of the plot while Halliday forms a triangle with his wife and Jerrie the saloon girl. As Earp, Randolph Scott is adequately heroic but has little to work with in terms of personality, while Romero only left me wondering what Anthony Quinn could have done with the role -- the closest Quinn ever came was the Holliday a clef role in Edward Dymytryk's Warlock. Worst of all, this Tombstone movie can't come up with a proper antagonist for Earp. Carter is set up early as the "big bad," only to be eliminated two-thirds through the picture. His assistant, Pringle, seems poised to step in, but in the very next scene Earp goads him into a fatal gunfight. That leaves the barely sketched out Curley Bill as the ultimate antagonist in an O.K. Corral fight that really feels like an anticlimax after all the storm and stress of the surgery scene. That's all a double shame, not just for the movie itself but for genre movie fans, given who plays the villains.
Frontier Marshal appears to be the first true team-up of John Carradine (Carter) and Lon Chaney Jr. (Pringle). Chaney had done bits in some earlier Fox films in which Carradine had more prominent parts (e.g. Jesse James), but Pringle is one of Junior's more prominent supporting roles before his breakthrough in Of Mice and Men. It's definitely an improvement for him on his labors for Cecil B. DeMille, who left almost all of Chaney's performance in Union Pacific on the cutting room floor, reducing the struggling young character actor to a few shots as a bystander despite being a named character in the end credits. For Carradine, a rising character actor at Fox, this film was just another day at the office; he contributes nothing special to a standard villain part. By comparison, Chaney's participation in an A picture is virtually a showcase, though he only has a couple of big scenes. In the first, Pringle has kidnapped Eddie Foy and forced him to perform at the Palace rather than the Bella Union. He stands just offstage twirling his two guns menacingly as Foy attempts to entertain the crowd. While Earp charges in through the audience to rescue Foy, Halliday appears in the wings to keep Pringle covered. In a priceless moment (perhaps) for Chaney fans, Doc decides that the audience expects entertainment and shouldn't be disappointed. He forces Pringle to dance, keeping time with bullets aimed at Chaney's feet as the big lug does a desperate soft-shoe routine. It may be the only time Lon Chaney Jr. ever dances on film. His other highlight is his shootout with Scott, his one scene as leader of the Palace gang. At first, Pringle has no intention of shooting it out with Earp, promising the marshall that Curley Bill will take care of him soon enough. But Earp's casual insult provokes a foolhardy attack, punctuated by Chaney's effective pantomime (in lieu of modern effects) of taking a bullet to the head. Thus pass Chaney and Carradine on their way to their destiny as horror men. They'll next encounter each other in The Mummy's Ghost, when Carradine plays the latest priest to revive the hapless Kharis. By that time, Carradine will already be past his peak of prestige, while Chaney will be in a thankless holding pattern as Universal's "master character creator." Frontier Marshal may be worthless otherwise, but it catches the pair as a team before either man had an inkling of his actual acting destiny. As that, it's a film of historical and maybe even sympathetic interest.
When Larry Talbot responded to a woman's distress call in Dr. Edelmann's house, he had no idea until after the fact that he was about to have a close encounter with Count Dracula. It's unclear from the evidence of House of Dracula whether Larry even knew that "Baron Latos" was a fellow patient of the great scientist. Yet the next time we see Talbot, he is a sworn enemy of the Count and all his evil works (whether Dracula knows this or not), tracking him across the Atlantic to thwart his latest scheme. Asked why he must battle Dracula almost on his own, and definitely without police aid, Larry tells a new friend that going to the cops would require him to explain "why I know what I know." But what's to explain? Why can't Larry simply say that he was being treated at the late Dr. Edelmann's clinic in Visaria when he encountered the vampire? Leave aside whether American cops would believe the vampire part; unless Talbot has a compulsion to tell the whole truth he shouldn't have to say that he was a werewolf, or believed himself to be, at the time....that is, unless Larry was talking about something else that explains why he knows what he knows about Dracula.
There's an obvious temptation to try to draw a line of continuity from House of Dracula to Bud Abbott [and] Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), to give the film its full title, but is it necessary to try? My friend Wendigo says he used to wonder how Larry's cure from the previous film failed. For amusement purposes only, he speculates now that Dr. Edelmann's surgery simply lacked lasting effect. The pressure on Larry's brain may have reasserted itself, or his curse may have. While there is no compelling reason to identify Charles Barton's comedy as a sequel to Erle C. Kenton's monster rally, Wendigo, like many people, can't help thinking of it as one. When Larry talks of what he knows, then, he could just be referring to the events of House (which Dr. Edelmann would have to have filled him in on in the doctor's declining moments of sanity) or he could be dropping a hint of a to-date untold story that may link Talbot's pursuit of Dracula to the resurgence of his curse.
My own view is that A&CMF is as much of a cartoon, if not obviously more so, than House of Dracula was in their common disregard for continuity. While HofD barely acknowledges its predecessor, House of Frankenstein, A&CMF acknowledges HofD not at all. Dracula never calls himself Baron Latos (it's "Dr. Lejos" instead) and no attempt is made to explain his latest escape from exposure to sunlight. Since it's unclear whether Latos even knew that Edelmann was keeping the Frankenstein Monster in a separate lab, HofD can tell us nothing about how the master vampire hooked up with the creature. There's definitely a tale to be told here if you feel a need to explain how everyone got from House to Florida, but we can just as easily take House out of the equation altogether and consider A&CMF a kind of default Universal Horror film with the classic monsters in what might be assumed was their typical state. And because Larry Talbot was essentially a good and righteous man when he wasn't the Wolf Man, he's naturally going to be Dracula's enemy.
Pitting Talbot against Dracula and the Monster is actually a stroke of genius on the part of Abbott & Costello's writers -- all veterans of Bud & Lou rather than the horror cycle. Compared to the House movies, A&CMF is a masterpiece of plotting with all the monsters integrated thoroughly into a single story. Larry's alliance with Wilbur Gray and Chick Young also integrates the comedians into a fairly straight horror-fantasy story beyond Dracula's plot to implant Wilbur's brain in the Monster's body. It makes Bud & Lou more than hapless scaredy-cats constantly on the run. Instead, they're part of a team that can take the battle to the enemy, even to the point of Bud Abbott, normally a monster of selfishness in his own right, rallying a guilt-stricken Talbot to invade Dracula's lair to save Lou from doom.
Lou Costello stoically faces Bela Lugosi's silent command (above) and Glenn Strange's silent scream (below).
The writers actually magnify this team effect by adding not one, but two femmes fatales to the mix, one on each team. Dracula's ally is Dr. Sandra Mornay, who's seduced Wilbur to lure him into their trap. She's both a femme fatale and a mad scientist over whom Dracula has (at first) some blackmail power because she's wanted in Europe for some questionable experiments. With Sandra, Universal was thisclose to an awesome trifecta of villainy: femme fatale, mad scientist and Nazi. Against her, the good guys have Joan Raymond, an intrepid insurance investigator dedicated to tracking down the "museum exhibits" Wilbur and Chick allegedly stole from the obnoxious wax-museum owner Mr. McDougal. She's a femme fatale because her method is also to seduce Wilbur, in the hope of finding out where he's stashed the "exhibits." The women are strong enough characters to have an important scene to themselves as they try to spy on one another's activities.
Dr. Mornay (Lenore Aubert) spies while Joan Raymond (Jane Randolph) scans The Secrets of Life and Death at a costume party. Below, Mornay likes to dress up as an evil crypto-fascist nurse for professional occasions.
It's another great feature of this film that McDougal remains a wildcard factor throughout, making mischief for the good guys while remaining clueless about the true nature of his stolen goods. This movie is full of great characters, with the glaring though minor exception of the dull scientist Dr. Stevens, Mornay's unwitting assistant, who ends up with Joan by default.
For many monster fans, the highlight of A&CMF is Bela Lugosi's return to the role that made his name, whose name he made. Wendigo thinks it's always great to see him back, especially since he looks in much better shape than he did in the (still good) Return of the Vampire. Compared to that film of five years earlier, it looks like at least five years have fallen away from him. But have the years changed his approach to Dracula? One change that occurred to me was that the character now has to deal with the legend of Dracula (by concealing his identity) in a way that Tod Browning's Dracula didn't. For his part, Wendigo sees some subtle differences in the two performances. There's a hint of doomed melancholy to the 1931 Bela, and a sense that Dracula is an unnatural force of nature. In 1948 Dracula is more evil, more of a schemer, more inclined to revel in villainy. But there are more differences between Lugosi and his imitators (Latos, Alucard) than between the '48 and '31 models. For starters, those so-called Draculas are hapless creatures with few survival instincts. More signifcant is Dracula's dominance of a briefly-defiant Mornay compared to Alucard's virtual victimization by the femme fatale of Son of Dracula. Bela makes it plain: "I am accustomed to obedience from women," and he gets it. Another difference: the pseudo (or crypto?) Draculas from the Forties get by with mesmerism, a learned skill almost, while Lugosi's Dracula dominates people by overwhelming force of pure will. He can command from a distance in ways his emulators can't dream of. However you may feel about the way the monsters are used here, Bela's Dracula is the real deal.
Lou mugs like mad, and brilliantly, in the "young blood and brains" scene, but he has to to keep Bela from stealing the scene just by wearing that smoking jacket.
It wouldn't surprise us if fans don't feel the same way about Lon Chaney Jr.'s Wolf Man. As Larry, Lon is impeccable, as impressive and heroic as he's ever been despite his bouts of despair and guilt. But the Wolf Man is still under the constraints necessary for the film to treat Larry as a good guy. That means he has to be an ineffectual monster in two scenes in which he proves incapable of even pouncing on Wilbur, instead tripping and tangling himself in every possible impediment. It's fair to ask what's worse: the fact that the Wolf Man can't escape from a locked hotel room or the fact that Lou Costello bops him on the nose, mistaking him for a masked Abbott, and survives? It's also fair to remind ourselves that the film is meant as a comedy, and that, as Wendigo reminds, me, Chaney was a very good sport about taking his monster's pratfalls. None of this compromises Larry Talbot's role as a hero, if not the hero of the movie. Wendigo adds: if he can't consider The Munsters a travesty of the Universal monsters, he can't complain about this film.
"Grrrrrr!" Even Bud makes fun of the Wolf Man, but his playacting gets him in trouble later in the picture.
In any event, the Wolf Man redeems himself a bit by taking down Dracula after a rather absurd battle that sees the desperate vampire throw everything he can lay hands on at the persistent lycanthrope. Bela even resorts to hitting him with a chair, rasslin'-style. You can ask whether the Wolf Man attacks Dracula because he knows the vampire is the enemy, or just because Dracula is there? On the other hand, the vampire's enmity toward the werewolf seems to be a matter of panicky disgust, as if Dracula had seen a large rat. In any event, Larry gets the job done even if it means a dip in the rocky drink. Do they both die? Well, Dracula is clearly out of action because the plunge breaks his power over Joan Raymond, but on the evidence of Talbot's suicide attempt in HofD it's definitely debatable whether the drop would kill the Wolf Man. It may be best for us to wish Larry Talbot godspeed on his long, long journey home -- or back to Europe, or wherever.
A&CMF, of course, is the top-billed team's big comeback film, restoring a declining pair to audience good will by riding their lingering good will toward the Universal Monsters. The comedy is knowing rather than contemptuous (unless you disapprove of the Wolf Man's clumsiness) and is arguably the first filmic expression of the fandom that would blossom with the spread of television in the next decade. As for Bud and Lou, once upon a time you could see a movie of theirs at least once a week on cable TV. Now this film is one of the few Abbott & Costello movies that turns up occasionally on stations like TCM. It's been a long time since we've seen any other besides their awful public-domain films. A&CMF shows the team in top form after a series of non-team experiments. Lou gives as good as he takes here in an incredible performance, talking back to everyone, going nuts with pantomiming the monster's movements, reveling in the attentions of two beautiful women and coping with the creatures with childlike credulity. Costello often strikes me as a progenitor of the obnoxious infantile men of modern movie comedy, but Lou brings something extra to the show: a self-consciousness that cracks the fourth wall and invites you to share his enjoyment of the ride. His character may be a sap, but he's a sap and he knows it, and in a redeeming way he seems to know more than he thinks he knows. You can't leave this film feeling contempt for Lou Costello, and the more you watch the more little details you catch, including his titanic scene-stealing battles with Lugosi. His interplay with Abbott (and Chaney, for that matter) is note perfect.
"Back...back... He thinks I'm Dracula."
Abbott & Costello are Wendigo's favorite comedy team, and he has many fond memories of Sunday morning double-features on WPIX. I didn't like them as much as he did back then, but every time I see A&CMF I get an urge to see more of their films. Some time ago I put this film on my list of ten favorite comedies, and I'd say that Lou Costello gives one of my favorite comedy performances ever in it. With Bud and Lou in top form and the return of the monsters, I'm inspired to ask: does any other Hollywood studio have a film in its library that is as definitive an expression of its creative identity as this film is for Universal? Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein is Universal's monument.
And here's the Realart trailer, uploaded to YouTube by horrormovieshows
The way he walked was thorny, though no fault of his own.... This past weekend, moviegoers saw Lawrence Talbot begin a new journey along a fairly familiar path. My friend Wendigo is invalid enough that he can't watch a film he craves to see until it hits DVD, so this weekend he and I entertained ourselves by examining the end of Talbot's original journey -- the two ends, actually: the formal end of his storyline and a satirical epilogue.
So we start at the end: Erle C. Kenton's House of Dracula (1945), a film that some take as proof that the Universal Monster genre had gone creatively bankrupt. Its cavalier attitude toward series continuity, its late attempt to almost undo Universal's place in history as the pioneers of true supernatural content in horror films by reducing curses to medical ailments, and its upstaging of all the classic monsters by a mad scientist, make it look like the end of the series (for it's very consciously the end) had come just in time, if not a little too late. But Wendigo, I suspect, isn't the only person who considers it at the very least an improvement on 1944's House of Frankenstein, and speaking for myself, I think that mad doctor deserves some credit as Universal's last great creation of its classic, pre-Creature From the Black Lagoon era.
Continuity is out the window once Baron Latos, the man who claims to be (and as far as Universal is concerned, is) Count Dracula bats his way through an open window to ogle Miliza, a live-in nurse and research assistant in the employ of the eminent Dr. Edelmann (Onslow Stevens). After satisfying his voyeuristic urges, though not his vampiric ones, Latos (John Carradine) strolls into Edelmann's quarters shortly before dawn. Excusing the hour and the intrusion, Latos banters his way into a confession of his Count-dom and declares his readiness to be rid of the curse that compels him to drink blood. We last saw Latos as a pile of bones bleaching in the open air once he fell off the wagon in House of Frankenstein. So what's the rule, now? Did someone just have to drag the skeleton indoors to bring him back? Admittedly, we could ask what Dracula's staked skeleton was doing somewhere in Pre-Occupied Europe at the start of HofF when we saw alleged Dracula Count Alucard skeletonized somewhere in Louisiana at the end of Son of Dracula? Universal was no longer asking questions, probably presuming that audiences no longer regarded its monsters as anything but cartoon characters who could turn up at any time or place as a script demanded, but that doesn't mean we can't ask.
Carradine's glare at Martha O'Driscoll may have something to do with her being billed ahead of him in a film called House of Dracula!
Wendigo likes to speculate that Latos and Alucard are imposters, either vampires actually turned by the original Dracula (you know who) or interlopers exploiting the real one's absence to advance themselves in the realm of the supernatural. He offers this as a take-it-or-leave-it proposition, since he concedes that Universal had no interest in vampire continuity as of Son of Dracula. As Latos, Carradine has more to do in HofD than in his perfunctory previous outing, and he gives a better performance: more refined, colder, less southern gentleman-like. As the title says, he's the center of the film, though once again he drops out of the picture well before the end.
When he first saw HofD, Wendigo believed that Latos sincerely desired a cure but succumbed to his unnatural lust for Miliza. It's clear to him now that Latos had an urge for the nurse from a previous encounter, meant to vamp her and made himself Edelman's patient in order to get close to her -- but why doesn't he just bite her when he can freely fly through her window??? Wendigo suggests that Latos was toying with Edelmann and his staff, but he admits it's not a very convincing explanation. You could also argue that he initially sought a cure to win her as a human, since he submits to Edelmann's initial treatments. But he quits the treatments and sets about mesmerizing the nurse and making his usual spiel about the strange twilight world where the people are dead, yet alive, that peculiar emotionless realm where there are, on Latos's word, no material needs, yet he needs to drink the blood of the living. I wonder sometimes whether the mythical realm of Visaria where the House films take place isn't itself the strange twilight world where World War II isn't happening and Larry Talbot seems to be falling backwards through time from his 1941 starting point.
Could Latos have been cured? The film hints that Dr. Edelmann is on to something, and there'd be no reason for Latos to stop the treatments if they weren't going to work. Edelmann's success with Larry makes one wonder whether he could have worked similar wonders with a more compliant Latos, but his failure to complete the treatment leaves open whether the curse of vampirism is something beyond science. Of course, we had been led to believe that Larry's curse was beyond the ken of science, and look what happens to him.
What a coincidence. One day after Latos shows up at Edelmann's office, Larry Talbot turns up begging for help, only to run off impatiently when the doctor doesn't come running. We last saw Talbot dead at the end of House of Frankenstein with a silver bullet through the heart, shot there by a gypsy girl fulfilling the rule that one who truly loves a wolfman and is willing to die for him can kill him. Only he isn't killed. There's a lot of stuff that can kill a wolf man, we've learned over time, but nothing does it permanently. Larry gets himself arrested and locked in the local jail by the ever-authoritative Lionel Atwill, and the result leaves us asking why Talbot never thought of this before. Before the eyes of a hastily-summoned Edelmann, Larry transforms into the Wolf Man, tugs at the iron bars a few times, sinks to the floor in despair and rolls into a catatonic fetal position for the rest of the night. How the mighty are fallen! Admittedly, Wendigo realizes in retrospect that, in order to have a happy ending in 1945 under the Production Code, Talbot could have no blood on his hands. But this spectacle in jail, followed by his failure to kill Dr. Edelmann in a cliffside cave (the old man holds out until sunrise) make it a kind of relief that we never see the Wolf Man again.
Guess who they find in that cave? It's the Frankenstein Monster, who oozed his way here through the quicksand he sank in at the end of House of Frankenstein. Are we supposed to believe that? Yes! For there beside him are the bones of Dr. Niemann, the only explicit reference to the previous movie, and a mint-condition manuscript of Dr. Frankenstein's Secrets of Life and Death. So there is continuity of a sort, and we're all justified in asking every question you want about how Latos and Talbot got out of their predicaments. I suppose they could have handled the Monster the same way as the other monsters. I can see him banging on Edelman's door and announcing himself: "Me...sick...fix?...friend?"
Edelmann and Talbot drag the thing to the former's lab, where Larry warns the good doctor against experimenting with the Monster. His argument from experience, on top of a stern moral argument from Nina, his other nurse, convince Edelmann to leave it alone. Nina longs for Edelmann to cure her hunchback and pines for him as a person, though I wonder at her reasoning. As things stand she's the world's prettiest hunchback. Afterwards, she'd only be another pretty nurse. As it is, she has a prettier face than Miliza, but those insensitive boors Talbot and Latos can't look past the hump, apparently. They only have eyes for Miliza, and one wonders whether there's a missing scene in which Latos's jealousy over Talbot making a move on the blonde nurse provokes him into rejecting his treatments and asserting his dominance. You have to wonder. You have to wonder why poor Nina has to die in such a brutal way later on when she's a more sympathetic character than Miliza. Wendigo's sad conclusion is that Miliza was simply too blonde to die.
The lovely Jane Adams as Nurse Nina, with that distracting hump away from the camera
Anyway, Latos pulls a fast one on Edelmann, rejecting an emergency transfusion and instead infusing the poor doctor with his own accursed blood. He heads for Miliza's room to take her once and for all, but Edelmann recovers quickly, follows Latos into the room, and pulls a cross on him. As Larry enters through another door, Latos cowers and runs for his coffin. This is the only encounter of Chaney and Carradine in the entire film, but Wendigo points out that this could be sufficient to establish Talbot's lasting enmity toward Dracula, since the vampiric bastard was going after his woman! We learn quickly that Latos has planned things poorly. All this time he's existed at Edelmann's suffrance, since the doc could expose Latos's encoffined corpse to the sunlight through a basement window anytime he pleased. After this episode, Edelmann damn well pleases.
Larry never actually sees Baron Latos face to face, so the fact that Count Dracula looks quite different in their next encounter wouldn't have fazed him at all.
Exit Latos, but he's done his evil work. His blood flows through Edelmann's veins, but instead of developing a thirst for blood, the accursed doctor develops a lust to kill. It's ironically Wolf Man-like, but Wendigo says it's Universal's way of finally doing a Jekyll-Hide character. Edelmann doesn't seem to have become a vampire, but he transforms when night falls into a depraved killer. Up to this point, Onslow Stevens has been a benign presence and a straight man for the monsters. Now he takes over the movie and becomes a total badass. With minimal makeup, some mussed-up hair, and lots of his own body language, the transformed Edelmann is a really menacing presence, all the more so for not ranting and raving but playing his malice very cool.
Dr. Edelmann goes through one of those dream-induced transformations, unleashing Onslow Stevens as a grim but gleeful freak who takes over House of Dracula.
Fortunately, while he's still himself Edelmann performs his miracle operation on Talbot, applying some plant extract on Larry's unshaven skull to make it expand, relieving the pressure which we now learn triggered the poor man's lycanthropy. This is a mixed blessing, since that pressure also made Larry immortal, but maybe that was just the power of positive thinking. Whatever was going on in his head, Wendigo says we should bottle it and sell it. If all you have to do is lock yourself in a cell for three nights out of the month, that's not really a high price to pay. It was for Larry, though. He makes clear here that it's unendurable for him to undergo the transformation even if confinement renders him harmless. It's one more grace note in a memorable, archetype-creating multi-film performance by Lon Chaney Jr. Some find his suffering insufferable, but we feel that it expresses a kind of righteous recognition that his condition isn't just bad for him, but profoundly wrong. Wendigo especially appreciates the consistent portrayal of Larry as someone crying for help, or crying out warnings, to whom no one wants to listen. He gets past that early here, since everyone sees him change in jail, but he still has to deal with Atwill's accusation that he committed Edelmann's murders. For once he has to plead innocence, but he gets the same old skepticism.
Look into the light, Larry!
Does Larry's cure betray the concept of the Wolf Man as a tragically accursed creature? Wendigo doesn't think so, simply because Talbot has always been a good guy at heart, despite his unconscious rampages under the full moon. The fact that Universal gave Larry a happy ending is probably the best proof we have of Talbot's popularity with moviegoers. You have to presume that people wanted to see the guy get a break. So why is he a Wolf Man again three years later? Arguably because people wanted him back.
Wendigo can't deny that House of Dracula has plot holes one could fly a jet through and has a questionably rushed finale. After Edelmann's final showdown with Talbot, the Monster lurches through a scene, swatting victims aside almost by accident, before exploding equipment causes a flashback to the finish of Ghost of Frankenstein. This film is in many ways a slapdash product, with an unoriginal score but its saving grace is the studio's desire to get the series over with, to give it an actual end.
This copy of the Realart trailer was uploaded to YouTube by StevieRotten.
This past weekend Wendigo wanted to clean his palate after watching a wretched cheapo vampire picture from 2008, The Thirst: Blood War. I asked him for a comment on that one, but he says simply, "It's too horrible for words, amateur hour all over the place -- worse than Subspecies or Vampire Journals! People like C. Thomas Howell and Tony Todd must have been hard up to take the money the producers of that one were offering. It was a depressing experience with some of the lamest vampires and lamest actors ever." After watching that one, Wendigo wonders how anyone can question Lon Chaney Jr.'s performance in Robert Siodmak's film for Universal.
Actually, he knows how. Creighton has been lambasted for being miscast, for looking like Farmer Greenjeans playing a vampire, for being stiff, uncomfortable, incompetent in the role. Wendigo sees things a little differently. He can't deny Junior's awkwardness and discomfort, but he thinks that "Count Alucard" should seem uncomfortable as he finds his way in a new land. He should seem alien if not hostile on his predatory mission to steal America's younger, stronger, more virile blood. He's obviously not a seductive vampire, and only goes after one woman in the entire picture. But this story presents him as more of a Mephistopholes than a macho seducer, a partner in a Faustian bargain rather than a ravisher.
What's the point of the "Alucard" gambit when you've already identified Lon Chaney as "Count Dracula" in the opening credits? But because Universal did that, they felt a need to clarify the whole Alucard problem as quickly as possible, as soon as the Count's luggage arrives.
Even given all that, Chaney's clearly trying hard to keep his speech measured and mannered. If anything, he comes across less like a European aristocrat and more like the Southern plantation owner he aspires to be -- the grooming, the grey hair and the moustache help that. He has the commanding manner of someone accustomed to dominating thralls or slaves -- ironic given his ultimate role in the story. Overall, Wendigo thinks that Junior did a good job. He has a strong presence and is almost at his best in scenes when he simply stands still and stares balefully at people. He's no Lugosi, nor even a Carradine, but then again those two weren't making the kind of film Lon was.
Vamp vs. vamp: Louise Allbritton and Lon Chaney Jr. Below, Allbritton suffers a temporary setback, but doesn't seem to hold the gunshots against her boyfriend later.
Most people will agree that Count Alucard is damn far from a master vampire. He comes on strong early but as the plot develops Alucard is exposed as a dupe and set up as a victim. Automatically Chaney is going to look weak compared to Lugosi, even the Lugosi of Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein who still doesn't take crap from women. But remember: it's Alucard who is made to look weak, and Chaney's just stuck with the role as it's written. And it's not as if Carradine was exactly masterful in House of Frankenstein; as Wendigo says, Dracula was Karloff's bitch in that film, and a pretty hapless one at that.
Kay makes Frank (Robert Paige) an offer he can't refuse -- so she says.
Speaking for myself, the fact that Son of Dracula isn't a conventional vampire movie is all in its favor. But what is it, exactly? Wendigo and I have a slight difference in emphasis. Noting Robert Siodmak in the director's chair and Louise Allbritton's staggering femme fatale performance, I call this film a film noir. Poor Alucard is being set up for a Postman Always Rings Twice scenario by the master female he thinks he's seduced -- the sap! -- and he never sees it coming. And Frank Stanley, as played by Robert Paige in what must be a career-best turn, is a perfect noir dupe of a hero, not to mention a kind of Renfield elevated to the status of hysterical protagonist.
"I'm a sane man fighting for his soul!" Robert Paige never says this in the film, but if he did, who would blame him?
Wendigo, on the other hand, acknowledges the noir or proto-noir elements, but thinks I should empasize Son's Southern gothic elements. It has a profoundly dysfunctional family at its heart and a doomed, obsessive romance between Kay Caldwell and Frank Stanley that started in childhood and probably has something to do with an early loss. I can't deny that a love so obsessive that you, the femme fatale, are going to seduce frickin' DRACULA so he'll turn you into a vampire, just so you can turn your real boyfriend into one after he throws the Count into the sunlight, so you lovebirds can be together preying on the living forever, is kind of on the gothic side. The genre blend gives the finale, when Frank has to decide whether to follow through on Kay's bargain, an honest tragic weight.
Wendigo also notes echoes of Bram Stoker's own Dracula (referenced in the film itself!) in certain scenes, particularly his attempted intimidation of the newly-made band of vampire hunters, as well as details that continued in later Universal films. Those include Dracula's moustache (see Carradine), his pretensions to scientific study, and those animated transformation scenes that impressed me as a kid. Robert Siodmak's brother Curt got away from his brain obsession enough to come up with a story (adapted by Eric Taylor) that evokes what came before (including his own concern with gypsies) while aiming the genre toward a new direction. Robert S brings a fresh eye to the proceedings and adds stylistic touches (with major help from the art department, including above-average bat effects) that virtually lift the film from B-movie status. If anything, some of the genre trappings (the need for expert vampire hunters in the fuddy-duddy Van Helsing mold, recitations of lore, etc.) weigh it down.
Lon Chaney Jr's case isn't helped by his being obliged to do really dumb things in his vampire character, especially his attempt to put out a fire by pounding it with a wooden plank. I'd heard that vampires have infantile minds, but this is ridiculous.
Maybe it's inevitable that Son of Dracula will disappoint people looking for a Dracula movie, but the qualities that may leave it less satisfactory as that kind of film are the same ones that redeem it for many viewers. Wendigo acknowledges that it's a flawed experiment (it does rather waste Evelyn Ankers, after all), but embraces Son as a fine vampire movie and a good film, period.
Cushing97380 uploaded the Realart trailer for Son of Dracula to YouTube. Here it is: