TCM Oct 12 Oct 18 2025
CAHIERS DU HOWERY
Oct. 12-18, 2025
SPECIAL SCI-FI-ADJACENT NOTE: On Oct. 13, from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. Eastern, TCM will present a marathon of eight movies patched together from episodes of the 1964-68 TV series The Man From U.N.C.L.E., starring Robert Vaughn and David McCallum.
OCT. 12
“William Castle was my idol. His films made me want to make films. I’m even jealous of his work. In fact, I wish I were William Castle.” – John Waters
Among director Castle’s nicknames were “the poor man’s Hitchcock” and (one he shared with Roger Corman) “king of the Bs.” A twin bill of his movies follows:
MACABRE (1958)
“Ladies and gentlemen, for the next hour and 15 minutes, you will be shown things so terrifying that the management of this theater is deeply concerned for your welfare. Therefore, we request that each of you assume the responsibility of taking care of your neighbor. If anyone near you becomes uncontrollably frightened, will you please notify the management so that medical attention can be rushed to their aid? Please set your watches. It is 6:45 in the evening in a town called Thornton.” – narration, with wall clock accompaniment, at the opening of Macabre
William Castle – who had previously sat in the director’s chair for Westerns, adventures in various other historical settings, and series mysteries (The Whistler, The Crime Doctor) – made his foray into horror with this movie. He himself admitted he did the move because of the immense box-office success of the French thriller Diabolique (1955). He called the similarities between the two films obvious. And he mortgaged his home to raise the money to make Macabre.
The byzantine plot, told partly in flashbacks, involves a terrifying phone call from a man who says he has kidnapped a small-town doctor’s little girl and buried her alive in a coffin. She must be found within five hours, or she’ll suffocate. And this happens to a family that has already experienced two recent tragedies.
The dialogue is slightly stilted, but some of the exchanges are mature for the era: e.g., in a flashback, an unmarried woman tells the doctor, in not so many words, that she is pregnant; the doctor tells her, in not so many words, he won’t perform an abortion.
It’s not the best effort by Castle or his collaborator, screenwriter Robb White, who later conspired with him on House on Haunted Hill (which follows Macabre), The Tingler (coming to TCM Oct. 25), and (my favorite) Homicidal.
But the animated closing credits are certainly among Castle’s finest, featuring incompatibly bouncy music composed by Les Baxter.
Castle – who inherited theatrical producer David Merrick’s sobriquet, “the Abominable Showman” – was infamous for his promotional gimmicks. Here he made a deal with Lloyds of London to insure Macabre audience members for $1,000 against “death by fright.” (Castle “was on to a safe bet,” says critic Alan Frank.) The policies were advertised in newspapers. Giant facsimiles of the policies loomed over marquees. Nurses – maybe real, maybe fake; sources vary – were on duty in theater lobbies.
My biggest problem with Macabre was that I mistook the two leads for two other actors. At first, I thought William Prince, who portrays the doc, was George Macready; and I thought Jacqueline Scott, who plays his nurse, was Anne Jackson.
But I’m positive that I saw Jim Backus (as the town sheriff, who has a score to settle against the GP) and Ellen Corby (as the physician’s maid). Robert Colbert (costar with James Darren on the 1960s series The Time Tunnel) has a small role as a chauffeur.
Scott, who died of lung cancer in 2020, was a Broadway actress who had her big-screen debut in Macabre. She appeared in one Twilight Zone installment, “The Parallel,” with Steve Forrest, and two episodes of The Outer Limits: the 1963 pilot, “The Galaxy Being,” with Cliff Robertson; and “Counterweight,” with Michael Constantine. Scott costarred in producer-director Bert I. Gordon’s awful, H.G. Wells-inspired Empire of the Ants (1977), with Joan Collins.
Macabre is based on the novel The Marble Forest, a concerted effort by a dozen members of the San Francisco chapter of the Mystery Writers of America, under the nom de a lot of plumes “Theo Durrant.”
“This William Castle feature – his first, but unfortunately not his last – was perhaps the biggest ‘gotta-see’ picture of my grammar school days. The title was pronounced by my friends in Stratford, Connecticut, as McBare.” – Stephen King, in a footnote of his 1981 overview of horror, Danse Macabre
“Mr. Castle got so carried away with the promotion that he arrived in a hearse at some of the premieres and made his entrance popping from a coffin. Was this not the ultimate in auteurism? Would Jean-Luc Godard have gone this far? Would he have arrived in a wrecked car to promote Weekend? Would Sergei Eisenstein have arrived in a battleship?” – John Waters (again)
“Rather laborious flashbacks start explaining the whys and wherefores of the mystery with small-town ‘revelations’ in a Peyton Place manner.” – Time Out Film Guide
“Promises much, delivers little.” – Leonard Maltin
“Genuine but unsuccessful attempt to film a horror comic.” – Halliwell’s Film Guide
“Has about enough imagination to fill an eggspoon.” – Time & Tide, a former British political and literary magazine (1958)
Millionaire Vincent Price offers $10,000 (which was real money back in 1958) to any one of a group of five guests, from various walks of life, who dares to spend the night at a so-called party in, as Elisha Cook Jr. puts it, “the only really haunted house in the world” – where seven people over the years have been murdered in ghastly fashions.
Price has rented the house from Cook. The latter and the other four guests are strangers to Price’s Frederick Loren (no relation to Frederick Metzengerstein) and to one another. Also attending is Frederick’s fourth wife, Annabelle Loren (no relation to Annabel Lee). “The first [wife] simply disappeared; the other two died,” she informs a guest.
The party favors are handguns encased in little coffins.
The exterior of the house is really a Frank Lloyd Wright home in L.A.
Castle’s moviegoer bait for THoHH: In theaters running the thriller, at a crucial moment, a glowing skeleton on a wire floated above the heads of audience members. Castle dubbed this effect “Emergo.” The Saturday Evening Post said the skeletons presented “irresistibly attractive targets to small boys with slingshots.”
“No indignity is too great [for the houseguests] – in boom-time fifties America, anything is endurable in the pursuit of financial reward.” – David J. Skal
“Despite William Castle’s cool and essentially passionless direction, House on Haunted Hill is a remarkably satisfying and frequently very scary film in which one will look in vain for any meaning beyond its bag of Hallowe’en tricks.... [It’s] something of a bargain basement prize package of a horror film.” – Leonard Wolf
“William Castle, doing what he did best: scaring the shit out of the kids in the
audience.... [Regarding Emergo:] Excited patrons, knowing what was going to happen, were well armed with candy boxes to throw at the battered and defenseless bones.” – Michael Weldon
“William Castle and Alfred Hitchcock were the first director-personalities. Before then, nobody in America knew what a director was.” – John Waters
“There’s more energy than sense in this camp exploitation piece ... but it’s enjoyable enough.” – Howard Maxford
“The picture works despite its gaping plot holes thanks to Castle’s sense of atmosphere, [scriptwriter Robb] White’s catty dialogue and Price’s sinister performance.” – Jonathan Malcolm Lampley
“The hero and heroine (Richard Long and Carolyn Craig) are as virtuous and as exciting as potato pancakes.” – David J. Hogan
“More boo-boo than boo.... Couldn’t cure a child’s hiccups.” – Newsweek
William Castle’s finest hour – not as director, but as producer – will be screened on Oct. 25: Rosemary’s Baby.
HANDS OF A STRANGER (1962)
I can’t quite categorize this unofficial adaptation of Maurice Renard’s The Hands of Orlac as so-bad-it’s-good.
Nor can I categorize it as so-good-it’s-bad (which is what I could call many reputed classics that I dislike).
How can we describe it? Unusual? Weird?
For one thing, the initial scenes may convince you that you’ve walked into the wrong theater, since the opening will make you swear you’re watching a gangster flick. Also, this has a Eurotrash vibe about it; you might imagine it’s an Italian rather than an American production – particularly since the lip movements are frequently out of sync with the voice track. Most egregious is one certain scene of repartee between surgeon Dr. Harding and the police lieutenant. The continuity editing leaves much to be desired as well, especially in a segment involving an apartment fire.
But a later sequence, which takes place at a carnival, is not to be missed.
There is a key difference between this rendition and the official screen versions of The Hands of Orlac made in 1925 and 1960: The main character here is out for revenge.
Director/writer/coproducer Newt Arnold must have taken an overdose of nasty pills before penning the script. The overwrought dialogue may certainly lean toward “so-bad-it’s-good.”
There are few recognizable faces in the low-budget cast, but it includes two statuesque actresses. Five-foot-10 Sally Kellerman has a bit as the girlfriend of one of Harding’s colleagues. Five-foot-nine Irish McCalla, a “Varga girl” who was television’s Sheena, Queen of the Jungle in the 1950s, plays a nurse.
And there is at least one other recognizable name: actor/coproducer Michael Du Pont (duPont here) was a member of the nylon-Teflon-making family. He plays another of the surgeons.
This was Arnold’s first of only three turns as director. (The two other movies are Blood Thirst and Bloodsport – do we detect a trend?) He was assistant or second-unit director on The Godfather Part II, Blade Runner, The Abyss, and other well-known films.
Unusual? Weird? Rather than the conventional “The End,” HoaS closes with a paraphrase of a line from The Tempest: “What is past is prologue.”
“The work of a group of young film people that impress one as promising amateurs.” – the (New York) Daily News
“The preposterously purple dialogue is a hoot.” – DVD & Video Guide by Mick Martin and Marsha Porter
“One of the most hysterically overwritten and overacted chillers of its era…. Plays less like a thriller and more like a soap opera, overstuffed with preposterous dialogue.”– Sixties Shockers by Mark Clark and Bryan Senn
“A science fiction picture with overtones of art, philosophy, romance and Dr. Kildare.... This little melodrama is a bit on the pretentious side.” – the New York Post
OCT. 13
HÄXAN: WITCHCRAFT THROUGH THE AGES (1922)
Made by a Swedish company and shot in Denmark, this pseudo-documentary purports to view medieval and Renaissance witchcraft through the lens of modern psychology. The first 13 minutes of the 107-minute silent are a history lesson, illustrated with old engravings, ancient statuary, and models.
This is interesting, but things really get rolling with the middle portion of the movie, when the screen bursts forth with bizarre re-creations of Black Masses, church-sanctioned torture, self-flagellation, and Macbeth-style cooking classes.
There’s also a bit of nudity. (After all, it is a Scandinavian picture.) Häxan was banned in the United States and other nations. Paste magazine has called it the “most censored silent film ever.”
The final 17 minutes deal with contemporary superstitions and posit that supposed witches of old were suffering from what in the more civilized early ’20s were known to be “nervous disorders” or “hysteria.”
The outré costumes and settings will still impress contemporary viewers. Danish director Benjamin Christensen appears as Satan himself, flicking his tongue in a manner that puts Jimi Hendrix to shame.
Häxan was digitally restored for a 2016 release.
“There has always been and there continues to be a popular fascination with the sexual habits of those committed to celibacy. In many accounts, these repressed desires ultimately surface in deviant forms. The moments of unconscious sexual release found in Benjamin Christensen’s Witchcraft Through the Ages are acts of sadomasochism that would make the Marquis de Sade dance with pleasure.” – the horror documentary Kingdom of Shadows (1998), narrated by Rod Steiger
“The film, with its wild orgies, lewd old women, spells, cavortings, potions, and black magical rites, is by turns horrifying and hilarious – as gripping today as when it first appeared.” – Ivan Butler (1967)
“A work of pure cinema that seems as lively and inventive today as it did in the 1920s.” – Nikolas Schreck (2001)
“Perhaps unclassifiable, but genuinely horrifying and even still shocking today.” – Peter Kobel (2007)
“Many sequences are genuinely grotesque, with echoes of Bosch and Goya, but there is also a humorous dimension.” – Phil Hardy
“An uneven mixture of illustrated lecture and imaginative moviemaking.” – Carlos Clarens
Häxan “is not just scientific and artistic, it is an ethical event.” – Film-Kurier, a former German magazine (1924)
“Wonderful though this picture is, it is absolutely unfit for public exhibition….” – Variety (1923)
“Not recommended for conservative or younger viewers.” – Robert K. Klepper
“Gave the censors ulcers in the 1920s.” – DVD & Video Guide by Mick Martin and Marsha Porter
“Subject matter too grim for most picture houses [of the day].” – John McCarty (1994)
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Trivia time: Clips from Häxan are used in director Dwain Esper’s 1934 sexploitation classic, Maniac. A second or two of Häxan can be seen in the 2019 Netflix documentary on blues master Robert Johnson, ReMastered: Devil at the Crossroads.
OCT. 16
Murder, She Committed? After Angela Lansbury’s death in 2022, playwright-actor Harvey Fierstein paid this tribute: “She, my darlings, was EVERYTHING.” TCM Star of the Month Lansbury was born on Oct. 16, 1925, and the channel will celebrate her 100th with five of her finest films, all of which can be categorized as thrillers. She earned Academy Award nominations for best supporting actress for three of these: Gaslight, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and – one that I don’t review below, though it is certainly a horror story – The Manchurian Candidate (Oct. 17, 12 a.m. Eastern), which TCM also screened on 10/11.
Lansbury won an accolade for the stage musical that will close this night’s fest: Sweeney Todd. She garnered one of her five “competitive” Tony Awards for this adaptation of the dark legend. (In addition, on her shelf were a sixth Tony – and an Oscar – each for lifetime achievement.)
The penultimate drama in the Lansbury commemoration is Kind Lady (1951; Oct. 17, 2:15 a.m. Eastern), which, like Gaslight, is based on a play; this mystery is a remake of a 1935 drama that outdoes its predecessor.
An actress of extraordinary range, Lansbury could portray either accomplice or victim with equal authority.
And is it a programming coincidence that two of the titles in this marathon – Gaslight and The Manchurian Candidate – have become current idiomatic terms indelibly intertwined by journalists and scholars with the actions of a certain sitting U.S. president, who shall remain nameless?
Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman are Gregory and Paula Anton, and the main setting is 1885 London.
Joseph Cotten is a Scotland Yard detective who reopens the case of Paula’s aunt, a world-famous opera singer who was the victim of an unsolved murder, a decade earlier, in the house now occupied by the Antons. Dame May Whitty is the busybody neighbor.
“Everybody ought to have a maid,” as the song says. Here it’s saucy Lansbury, in her screen debut. She turned 18 during the making of Gaslight. At a 1978 tribute to director George Cukor, she remarked that in 1944 she didn’t know her elbow from a hole in the ground (I’m paraphrasing). Cukor “introduced me to style,” she added.
It’s remarkable how pre-CGI makeup and wig experts made Bergman look like an adolescent in the opening (1875) scenes.
The “missing” picture and the piano recital exchanges between Bergman and Boyer are among the most powerful sequences. There’s a Shakespearean quality about parts of this photoplay.
Gaslight was nominated for seven Academy Awards and garnered two, for best actress and best art direction.
Both the remake and the 1940 original screen adaptation are based on a theatrical piece, also known as Angel Street, by Patrick Hamilton (who had earlier penned the play Rope, adapted by Hitchcock in 1948). Vincent Price was first to play the role analogous to Gregory Anton on Broadway!
And speaking of the Great White Way, coscripter John L. Balderston had earlier revised the British theatrical version of Dracula for the U.S. stage, and he’d worked on a passel of well-known ’30s horror screenplays.
“Prepare yourselves … for a lengthy and restless stretch on tenterhooks.” — Bosley Crowther, The New York Times
“Arriving late in the World War II, Gaslight was superbly timed to jangle the nerves of American audiences already feeling a deep sense of unease about the world.... ‘Gaslighting’ has come to mean any behaviour that seeks to falsely manipulate another person’s fears, in order to undermine their sanity.” – The Sydney Morning Herald (2018)
“In playing love scenes Ingrid Bergman has no contemporary equal. She appears not only to know the emotion and how to make it come to life on the screen but also to realize, as no other screen actress does, that love is made up of kinds of candor, force and delicateness against which, so far, the Hays [censorship] Office has contrived no adequate nets.” – Time magazine (1944)
“The bloom has worn off this classic chiller …, but lush production, Victorian flavor, and fine performances remain intact.” – Leonard Maltin
THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (1945)
“Adoring someone is certainly better than being adored. Being adored is a nuisance. You’ll discover, Dorian, that women treat us just as humanity treats its gods. They worship us and keep bothering us to do something for them.”
Before Botox, before liposuction and collagen treatments, before face-lifts and tummy tucks, there was The Picture of Dorian Gray. In the Wilde-based movie’s noninvasive procedure, Gray (Hurd Hatfield) simply offers his soul in exchange for remaining young – despite a life of wantonness and dissipation – while a portrait of him grows old. It grows to be downright grotesque, in fact. (Most of the film is B&W, but shots of the hideously changed artwork, by painter Ivan Albright, are in Technicolor.)
The dialogue overflows with Wildean aphorisms. The director-scripter was Albert Lewin, a former English professor.
Lansbury, in her third big-screen appearance, and Donna Reed are Gray’s lovers. (Lansbury’s real-life mother, Moyna Macgill, portrays the Duchess.) Peter Lawford is Gray’s rival for Reed’s heart. George Sanders is Gray’s hedonistic-life coach. Narrated by Cedric Hardwicke.
Harry Stradling Sr. won an Academy Award for his cinematography.
“In much the same manner as Val Lewton’s horror films, The Picture of Dorian Gray frightens audiences by mere suggestion, without ever resorting to distracting visual representations of the horrible. All the infamy of Hatfield’s character is implied, resulting in a building up of evil so horrible it becomes unspeakable.” – The Movie Guide, edited by James Monaco
“Only marginally a horror film, this adaptation of Oscar Wilde was still a much scarier film than the traditional horror films of its period.” – William K. Everson
“It overcomes its occasionally self-conscious artiness to hint at a profound and unfathomable horror of the soul.” – Jonathan Rigby
“Some chilling moments between periods of exquisite langueur.” – Carlos Clarens
“Slow, elegant, handsomely photographed adaptation of an overly epigrammatical novel. All very civilized, though sometimes a bit of a bore.” – Howard Maxford
“Albert Lewin’s version is respectful, earnest, and, I am afraid, dead.... The movie is just a cultured horror picture, decorated with epigrams and an elaborate moral, and made with a sincere effort at good taste rather than with passion, immediacy, or imagination.” – James Agee
“The actors and their director are as impressed with Wilde’s language as we are, with the result that the film suffers from a respectful inertia that turns an urgent human story into an allegory whose truth we accept with a yawn.” – Leonard Wolf
Lewin’s “naive conception of refinement in the cinema … presumes to vulgarize Wilde … for the sake of bringing kulchur to the masses.” – Andrew Sarris
“Oscar Wilde would probably have split his portly sides laughing at the mawkish pomposity.” – Bosley Crowther, The New York Times
OCT. 17
SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET (1982)
“There’s a hole in the world like a great black pit
And it’s filled with people who are filled with shit
And the vermin of the world inhabit it – But not for long! They all deserve to die!”
I have but one bone to pick with Tim Burton’s 2007 adaptation of the 1979 Stephen Sondheim musical Sweeney Todd: The film director should have hired male and female leads with better singing voices.
Props to Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter, but they and the rest of the movie’s cast can’t hold a candle to George Hearn, Angela Lansbury & Cie. in the 1982 videotaped stage play, which was first shown on a cable channel and then on PBS.
Please don’t expect West Side Story or Follies.
In the context of this dark thriller’s plot, I’ve always thought Todd, the 19th-century London barber, could sing a song by the band Moby Grape: “Murder in My Heart for the Judge.” (But we’ll leave that for an imagined future rock musical based on legendary serial killer Todd. I envisage Alice Cooper or Rob Zombie in the title role.)
Todd – alias Benjamin Barker, ashen-faced and sporting a wild Wilde hairstyle – seeks revenge against Judge Turpin of London.
And what has gotten Todd into such a lather? Turpin, lusting after Todd’s wife, had this unfortunate Uriah transported on false charges. Now, in 1846, after serving 15 years of a life sentence, Todd has escaped from Australia’s Botany Bay prison colony. His two aims are to wreak vengeance and to again see his wife and daughter, Johanna, who was very small when he was taken from her side.
As the lights go up, we hear the high-decibel screech of a strange whistle – which will assault our ears again and again, accompanying each onstage slaying. Soon Sweeney arrives by boat in London with Anthony (the stock hero), a young sailor who rescued him from a raft in the sea, and who will eventually share love with Johanna.
But Todd meets former neighbor Mrs. Lovett (comic relief Lansbury). Her ramshackle eatery sells “The Worst [meat] Pies in London.” She tells him his wife went mad after being raped by Turpin and took arsenic, and the judge adopted Johanna as his ward. (Later, the jurist announces he intends to hastily marry Johanna, much against her wishes.) Now Todd is really ready for payback. He vows, “I will have vengeance! I will have salvation!”
Lovett, who’d always been attracted to him, has held on to the kit containing his chased silver-handled razors. He sings to these instruments: “… my friends … soon you will drip precious rubies.”
On the second floor of Lovett’s shop, Todd resumes his career as a barber and begins his career as a serial killer. As Time magazine’s T.E. Kalem observed, “There’s many a slit ’twixt the throat and the lip before the cup of revenge spills over.”
Sweeney desires an abstract revenge, like that had by today’s mass shooters, rather than a narrow, specific revenge.
Lovett hits upon a gory idea to both address a key encumbrance in Todd’s scheme and boost her struggling restaurant business. And so a symbiotic relationship is born. (This film could be half a double feature with Soylent Green.) In the end, three of the intended victims of Todd and his henchwoman manage to survive.
As one would guess, the play, which originally ran from 1979 to ’80, was controversial. Critics found no moral, no didacticism in the dialogue. Commonweal magazine said, “It is diagnosis without cure.”
Stephen Sondheim’s melodies are beautiful – if songs about homicide, cannibalism, and other nasty business may truly be called “beautiful.” I suggest viewers turn on the subtitles; otherwise you are likely to miss the intricacies of the lyrics.
Critics compared this work to Dickens and to The Threepenny Opera. However, Clive Barnes thought the music owed “more to Mahler, Alban Berg and Benjamin Britten than Weill.”
In 1979, the Times’ Richard Eder said Lansbury’s songs “are awesomely difficult and she does them awesomely well.”
Librettist Hugh Wheeler adapted the book from a 1973 British play penned by Christopher Bond. The television production was directed by Terry Hughes and videotaped at L.A.’s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.
The original play won eight Tonys, and this made-for-cable effort garnered three Emmys.
The tales of the fictional Sweeney have their origins in 14th-century French folklore and were siphoned through 19th-century English ballads.
Actors who have played the role in other on-screen interpretations include Ben Kingsley; Ray Winstone; and a cult favorite, the British barnstormer Tod Slaughter (his real surname).
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The following quotes relate to the original stage play, not the TV production:
“A musical accomplishment of the first order.” – Saturday Review
“I don’t think serious theatergoers have ever seen anything quite like it, and I don’t think I, for one, will ever see its equal again.” – Rex Reed
“Violence is indeed rooted in social injustice, in the weight of exploitation that rests on the backs of the poor. But though the rage of the violent aims at authentic oppressors, it carries in its wake and victimizes fellow oppressed.” – an exegesis of the plot by Gerald Rabkin of The Soho Weekly News, which was based in Lower Manhattan
“It is bloody. And bloody wonderful.” – Joel Siegel of WABC’s Eyewitness News, New York
“With so much to occupy our eyes and ears, and so much to respect, there is an uncomfortable void …, to my mind a most serious one. The story, as told, leaves us restive and unabsorbed. It also leaves us puzzled as to why its creators went to so much trouble to tell it…. We are forced to ask ourselves: what is this musical about?” – Walter Kerr, The New York Times
Trivia time:
Regarding her clownish costume, Lansbury was quoted in the Times in 1982 saying she’d been “well aware of the possibility of coming across like a gargoyle.” As for her 1979-80 stage presence, critics made these similes:
• “a sort of gingerbread cut out” – John S. Patterson, Villager newspaper
• “made up like a tabby cat” – Sy Syna, Wisdom’s Child, a former paper based on Manhattan’s West Side
• “looks like a rag doll mass-produced in some home for the blind” – Howard Kissel, Women’s Wear Daily
• “like Winston Churchill disguised as a snail” – John Simon, New York magazine
And here’s a 20th-century legend: The original play’s scenic designer reportedly bought a Rhode Island iron foundry and repurposed parts of it for the Broadway set. I don’t know if this “Industrial Revolution setting,” as a (New York) Daily News critic dubbed it, was transplanted to Los Angeles. But the one here surely must lose some of its effect on the screen as opposed to the live experience.
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I am attaching my favorite among the two dozen songs. I’ve heard various sopranos’ renditions, but none reflect the anguish expressed in the voice of Betsy Joslyn as Johanna, held a virtual prisoner by the wicked judge. She knows why the caged bird sings:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_K1maGFLvY&t=4s
The Browning Version: A morning of movies directed by Tod Browning, who helmed 1931’s Dracula, includes one film starring Bela Lugosi, one with Lionel Barrymore and Lugosi, and one more with Barrymore – whom you know and love as part of a thespian dynasty and as the great uncle of Drew Barrymore, of Firestarter and (as herself) the 2024 horror Smile 2:
THE THIRTEENTH CHAIR (1929)
That the Broadway play was adapted for the screen once before (1919) and once after (1937) director Tod Browning’s version belies the fact that it is a pretty weak mystery. In a Calcutta mansion, a séance is held in the hopes of solving a murder. Bela Lugosi portrays a police inspector. Leila Hyams (of Browning’s Freaks and Erle C. Kenton’s The Island of Lost Souls) is a suspect. London-born Margaret Wycherly (Cagney’s “Ma” in White Heat) is the medium; she repeats her 1916 Broadway role. As movie historian William K. Everson observes, from a certain point, “the film is in the palm of Lugosi’s hand, and he milks every rich theatrical line for all that it is worth.”
MARK OF THE VAMPIRE (1935)
“There is no more foul or relentless enemy of man in the occult world than this dead-alive creature spewed up from the grave.” – professor Zelin (Lionel Barrymore)
After the abject commercial failure of Browning’s Freaks (1932; coming to TCM Oct. 30), the director started recycling old ideas. For example, in 1935’s The Devil-Doll (coming up next), Lionel Barrymore disguises himself as an aged woman. In the Browning-Lon Chaney silent The Unholy Three (1925; remade by the pair as a talkie in 1930), the Man of a Thousand Faces employs a similar charade.
Mark of the Vampire is Browning’s reboot of his own 1927 silent, now “lost,” London After Midnight (starring Chaney), and it’s based on a story penned by the director, called The Hypnotist.
Among the other screenwriting credits is John L. Balderston, who collaborated on the decade’s classics Frankenstein (TCM, Oct. 18 and 31), The Bride of Frankenstein (Oct. 31), The Mummy (Oct. 31), and Mad Love (Oct. 25). Coscripter Guy Endore worked on Mad Love and The Devil-Doll.
Despite the writing pedigree, various authors have commented on the absurdity of the MotV plot, and the fact that the killer’s modus operandi is a medical impossibility.
Perhaps viewers should, like the bloodstream itself, simply go with the flow. You’ve got cinematography by future Oscar winner James Wong Howe. You’ve got Bela Lugosi wandering around with a bullet in his temple. (The hole in the head is never explained, but it involves a script draft, dealing with incest and suicide, which was – for obvious reasons – not used.)
You’ve got creepy Carroll Borland as Lugosi’s flighty daughter, Luna. You’ve got Lionel Barrymore, Lionel Atwill (as his usual police inspector), and a gaggle of familiar character-actor faces.
Who needs logic?
“Simply reeks of atmosphere.” – Bryan Senn
“James Wong Howe’s camerawork builds up … a meticulously created nightmare world of crumbling castles, gnarled trees, constant mist, spooky graveyards, and sinister peasantry.” – William K. Everson
“As the horror cinema’s first necrophile pin-up, Carroll Borland’s Luna is shown off to ravishing effect by cinematographer James Wong Howe.” – Jonathan Rigby
“Sentimentalists that we are, we’ve all forgiven Tod Browning for the ludicrous ending, since [MotV] offers some of the most artful and chilling vampiric doings of the ’30s and is stylistically better than many of Browning’s earlier films, including Dracula.” – Castle of Frankenstein magazine
“Sadly not a horror film nor a mystery film, but a rather unpleasant hybrid of the two.” – poet R.H.W. Dillard (co-scriptwriter of Frankenstein Meets the Spacemonster [1965])
“A handsome but flaccid thriller.” – Gregory William Mank
“It is a tired script bereft of the inventive ideas and dialogue of [Browning’s] original Dracula, though lighting cameraman James Wong Howe does a superior job.” – Dennis Fischer
“Out the window flew the bats, imaginative sensibility, and Browning’s reputation.” – Calvin T. Beck
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Trivia time: Carroll Borland (billed as “Carol” here), a 21-year-old Berkeley drama student at the time MotV was made, had befriended Lugosi via a manuscript she’d written as a teen, a sequel to Stoker titled Countess Dracula. She called Lugosi “the sexiest man I ever knew.” Borland had later briefly appeared on stage with him in a Dracula road company. (This was the actress’s claim, but author Gregory William Mank and others point out that there’s no evidence of any such theatrical tour.) She also asserted that she bribed an assistant director to get the role of Luna in MotV. She exited the cinematic world and went on to teach early childhood development at two California colleges. She returned for small roles in schlockmeister Fred Olen Ray’s Scalps (1983) and Biohazard (1985). As Luna, writes author Calvin T. Beck, she “seems to have stepped out of a Goya print.” Countess Dracula was finally published shortly after her death in 1994. Her Los Angeles Times obit reads, “many believe [her Luna makeup] was imitated over the years by such characters as Vampira, Elvira and Lily Munster.”
THE DEVIL-DOLL (1936)
In this movie, cowritten by director Browning, Erich von Stroheim, et al., Lionel Barrymore learns revenge can be a drag.
His character, Lavond, disguises himself as an old female shopkeeper in Paris in order to exact vengeance on an unholy three, a trio of former banking-business partners of his who had framed him. Earlier in the story, Lavond escapes Devil’s Island after 17 years of incarceration. A mad scientist (a fellow escapee) and his even madder spouse (“Malita”) provide Lavond with their discovery, a method of shrinking human beings to doll size, which becomes the means for his revenge.
Irish actress Maureen O’Sullivan takes time out from her stint as Tarzan’s better half to play Lavond’s estranged daughter.
Barrymore was one of many villains in Browning’s silent West of Zanzibar, starring Lon Chaney.
Irish-born art director Cedric Gibbons, who worked on this, Mark of the Vampire, and four other Browning horrors, won 11 Academy Awards for movies including Gaslight (to be seen on TCM Oct. 19) and An American in Paris.
The Devil-Doll’s dialogue is filled with irony, as befits the story of a masquerader. The special effects have aged pretty well.
“Here is a film paradox, a perfectly charming horror film.” – Leonard Wolf
“Much of the film’s enjoyment comes from watching Barrymore’s amusing portrayal of” an old woman. – John Brosnan
“Has about everything an adult-scarer needs except story. The fault lies with the failure of the scenarists to fortify the fantastic ‘idea’ with a helpful and credible plot.” – Variety
“So much attention was devoted by the makers of this picture to reducing the characters that the plot was simultaneously and inadvertently reduced to practically nothing.” – The Hollywood Reporter
“A strange combination of horror, science, and heartrending tragedy which never quite meshes and so ultimately bleeds together into an unsatisfying hodgepodge of fantasy and drama.” – Bryan Senn
Eyes that pierce the soul: Yet again, TCM pairs films sharing one common word in their titles.
OCT. 18
THE HYPNOTIC EYE (1960)
The stars include Jacques Bergerac as Desmond, a stage hypnotist, and Allison “Attack of the 50-Foot Woman” Hayes as Desmond’s assistant, Justine (undoubtedly named after the de Sade character).
The opening credits also list “Eric ‘Big Daddy’ Nord (King of the Beatniks) / Fred Demara (The Great Imposter) / Lawrence Lipton (Beatnik Poet Laureate).” These cats put the “hyp” in The Hypnotic Eye. (There are Wikipedia articles on all three, if you care to do further research.)
Lipton’s coffeehouse poetry recital is not to be missed. Demara, who plays a doctor — and who had had some practice by impersonating a surgeon in “real” life — doesn’t look a bit like Tony Curtis, who portrayed him in 1961’s The Great Imposter.
The plot: A police detective, his sweetie, and a police psychiatrist investigate a series of acts of “self-inflicted mutilation” by attractive young women in the city.
Note the detail of the home décor in the domestic scenes. Set decorator Frank Wade, mainly employed by some of our favorite classic TV shows, must have labored very hard.
One big flaw in the film: About 10 minutes before the end, there is an overlong audience-participation segment in which Desmond demonstrates the powers of suggestion on both the on-screen and real-life viewers. This segment and all its gesticulations might have been thrilling to moviegoers at the time; now it is a bore.
As they entered the theaters in 1960, patrons received balloons printed with a big peeper and the legend, “You cannot resist The Hypnotic Eye.” Similar balloons are used in Desmond’s “act.”
With this gimmick, dubbed “HypnoMagic,”* the Allied Artists studio was obviously attempting to duplicate the promotional genius of its big breadwinner, director-producer William Castle. But Hypnotic director George Blair, a TV journeyman, lacked Castle’s flair.
Scream queen Merry Anders is one of the victims. Among her genre appearances are Edward L. Cahn’s Beauty and the Beast; The House of the Damned; Ib Melchior’s The Time Travelers; and Women of the Prehistoric Planet.
The Hypnotic Eye is probably the only movie ever to juxtapose a comment about a photo of Sigmund Freud and a comment about a photo of Jayne Mansfield in the same line of dialogue. Screenwriter (and magician) William Read Woodfield was also a photographer for Life and Playboy, and product placements abound! (In 1962, Woodfield took the almost-nude pool pix of Marilyn Monroe during the making of her unfinished film, Something’s Got to Give.) He wrote numerous episodes of the TV series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and Mission: Impossible.
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* Not to be confused with “Hallucinogenic Hypnovision” in The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies (1964). At some showings of the ’64 flick, says author Rae Beth Gordon, when the “spinning vortex” hypnowheel appeared on-screen, “theater ushers in phosphorescent monster masks ran up and down the aisles threatening spectators with cardboard axes.”
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“Classic sleaze.” — Michael Weldon
“Surprisingly sleazy (for its time).” – DVD & Video Guide by Mick Martin and Marsha Porter
“In the film’s sexual and moral economy, the women’s acts of self-mutilation by fire, acid, and blades are monstrously disproportionate punishments for the very vanity, hope, and fear implanted in them by the advertising industry. ... [These scenes resemble] a grisly parody of a 1950s television commercial for cosmetic products.” — Kevin Heffernan
“Although the pace often lags, the characters become interesting as plot unfolds.” – David Elroy Goldweber
“Although the film is strictly stinko, [Hayes’s] last scene is a gem.” – Fangoria magazine
“Poorly developed characters … and too many onstage sequences sometimes bring the story to an abrupt hypno-halt.” – Sixties Shockers by Mark Clark and Bryan Senn
EYES WITHOUT A FACE (Les yeux sans visage; 1960)
Midnight Marquee magazine appropriately calls this a “left of the dial” horror classic. Oft imitated but never surpassed, director Georges Franju’s Les yeux sans visage is the story of mad doctor Génessier (Pierre Brasseur, the egotistical actor in 1945’s Les enfants du paradis), who kidnaps women in failed attempts to replace the disfigured face of his daughter (eerily masked Edith Scob) with their faces. Guilt-ridden Génessier caused the car accident that scarred the girl. Actress Juliette Mayniel (1936-2023) is a victim in perhaps the most graphic sequence.
Producers, who were “apprehensive that this mature horror film would prove to be too strong a medicine for the public,” summoned test audiences of male and female movie critics for closed screenings; the former winced a great deal, while the latter were “deeply moved,” noted an unbylined article published in 1962 in several U.S. papers. One of the critics, Simone Dubreuilh, thought this was because it’s a story that can best be understood by women. The article continued: Critic/actress/screenwriter “France Roche … wrote, ‘I could watch, without getting goose flesh, the beautiful Juliette Mayniel offer to the scalpel of the surgeon all of the skin of her face – but around me many sensitive men covered their eyes.’”
Alida Valli (Reed’s The Third Man, Hitchcock’s The Paradine Case, Bava’s Lisa and the Devil, Argento’s Suspiria and Inferno) is Génessier’s assistant, who will do just about anything for him.
The movie is adapted from a novel by Jean Redon. The scriptwriters included the crime-author team of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, who penned the novels on which Clouzot’s Diabolique and Hitchcock’s Vertigo are based.
The score was done by Maurice Jarre. Among his many awards were Oscars for the music of Doctor Zhivago and A Passage to India.
While viewing, try not to think too much about the Billy Idol song of the same name. (I wonder if anyone has ever done a song with the lurid title for the dubbed, heavily edited U.S. version of the motion picture: The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus? Are you listening, Rob Zombie? And the U.S. title is surely another reason why TCM juxtaposed the French thriller with the one that follows.)
“Replete with echoes of both Nazi experiments and the institutionalized torture enacted by the French government in Algeria; it is a paradigmatic example of the art film-horror hybrid.” – Murray Leeder
“Few horror movies are this brutal, or this gentle.... Along with Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Diabolique and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, Eyes Without a Face profoundly influenced the subsequent generation of European horror movies.” – Sixties Shockers by Mark Clark and Bryan Senn
“Eyes Without a Face, with its blending of poignant realistic details and Cocteau-influenced dream imagery, is a uniquely persuasive nightmare film, a hideous dream too vivid and emotionally authentic for disbelief.... It must be one of the three or four creepiest (and best) horror movies ever made.” – The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural (1986)
“Despite the fact that it contains three of the most horrid scenes yet filmed … the main impression left by the film is strangely one of austere beauty.... Franju has constructed a work which transcends its horrific content and leaves the spectator haunted, thoughtful and disturbed, even if not quite knowing why he should be.” – Ivan Butler (1967)
“Scenes of horrendous grue alternate with moments of quiet beauty.” – Joe Dante in Castle of Frankenstein magazine, reviewing the trimmed-down Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus
“It has a vague, flowing, lyric sense of dread which goes beyond the simpler effects of horror movies that don’t make intellectual claims.” – Pauline Kael
“Franju … managed to evolve a style that was both elegant and expressionistic, pure and magical.” – Steven H. Scheuer
“With a fluid rhythm and nocturnal scenes, director Georges Franju gives the schlock material an ethereal quality unique to horror films.” – The Entertainment Weekly Guide to the Greatest Movies Ever Made
“The first thoroughly modern, adult horror film, dispensing with the gothic trappings that had kept other modern genre films … mired in the past.” – Horror! The Definitive Companion to the Most Terrifying Movies Ever Made, by Kim Newman and James Marriott
“Eyes Without a Face … proves one thing. The French are thorough. Someone had the idea of making a horror film even nastier than anything Hammer Films could do; and they succeeded.” – John Braine, author of Room at the Top and Life at the Top, writing in the Daily Express
“Far too leisurely in its pace to create much horrific atmosphere and much of its genre reputation rests upon the clinical nastiness of the surgery scenes. The film has become a cult movie as much for Franju’s reputation as a cinema historian and theoretician as for its inherent qualities.” – Alan G. Frank
“The elaborate visual style gives the impression of having been calculated largely to conceal the deficiencies of the script.” – Roy Armes
“A piece of revolting, pandering, evil rubbish.... [The British censor] should have ordered it to be publicly burned in the Charing Cross-road. And, on top of the fire, he should have thrown the makers of the film, and the people who saw fit to release it in Britain.” – the Daily Herald (1960), a former London newspaper
“Need only be visited by psychotics who enjoy being bored between bouts of being sick.” – the News Chronicle, a former London paper
“When a director as distinguished as Georges Franju makes a horror film as fundamentally trite as [this], one cannot but feel tempted to search for symbols, an allegory, layers of interpretation. Unhappily, there is practically nothing in this inept work to offer any encouragement for doing so.” – Peter John Dyer in the Monthly Film Bulletin, a former British Film Institute publication
“It’s an anguish film. It’s a quieter mood than horror, something more subjacent, more internal, more penetrating. It’s horror in homeopathic doses.” – Franju
CHAMBER OF HORRORS (1966)
“But – you’re dead!”
“Yes, I am. Won’t you join me?”
Originally a failed television pilot, this wound up running in theaters, “built into a feature,” as Variety magazine put it, “via additional specially shot footage.”
It’s certainly above the average for a TV movie, but it never lives up to the opening scene: In his Baltimore home, ca. 1880, Patrick O’Neal’s character forces a minister at gunpoint to wed him to a corpse, whom he has strangled with her own hair (à la Robert Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover”).
Later, when the gentleman killer has been convicted and is transported on a train, a lax police officer cuffs O’Neal to a handbrake wheel. O’Neal manages to reach an ax, can’t cut the handcuffs with it, instead unscrews the wheel, jumps into the Potomac, chops off his right hand in a Hannibal Lecter-esque manner to keep the heavy wheel from dragging him to the bottom, and flees to New Orleans.
There, the fugitive has a craftsman make a hook and other deadly utensils to replace his missing extremity. He then returns to Baltimore to seek revenge against those responsible for his death sentence.
The actors carry the film, especially Wilfrid Hyde-White as one of two amateur sleuths who, as their day job, run the local House of Wax. (The other is Italy’s Cesare Danova, later of Animal House.) Jeanette Nolan is the murderer’s wealthy, cigar-smoking aunt. Doe-eyed Marie Windsor is a madam. One of the best scenes features proto-supermodel Suzy Parker. Wayne Rogers is an ill-fated police sergeant. Tony Curtis does a cameo (also with cigar). Harry Ellerbe, who plays a judge, is the butler in the Roger Corman-Vincent Price House of Usher. William Conrad narrates.
Aside from harking back to Vincent Price’s House of Wax (TCM, Oct. 31), Chamber of Horrors presages not only Hannibal but Se7en and the Spanish thriller The House That Screamed (La residencia).
Silliness factor: In an attempt to match director William Castle’s wild gimmicks, Chamber of Horrors interrupts the action here and there with the “fear flasher” and “horror horn,” which warn viewers a violent sequence is ahead. Needless to say, 1966-style small-screen violence may be yawn-inducing today.
Television veteran Hy Averback directed. Cowriter Ray Russell had earlier labored on Castle’s Mr. Sardonicus and Zotz! and Corman’s Premature Burial and X: The Man With the X-ray Eyes (both starring Ray Milland).
“Patrick O’Neal is so watchable a madman that 1966’s CHAMBER OF HORRORS … is tolerable for those who like a wallow in gore and grue. The color (especially the reds) is grand, the nineteenth-century-Baltimore ambiance beautiful and the goings-on as silly-scary as any buff could want – especially when O’Neal’s on hand minus a hand ….” – Judith Crist
“Boasts an excellent performance by O’Neal …. Some arrestingly lurid moments … are undermined by the TV format and the silly gimmicks.” – Phil Hardy
“Horror film fans may enjoy this…. All others will probably laugh at the wrong places.” – Steven H. Scheuer
“It’s all nicely atmospheric, handsomely dressed, even witty at moments, but not the least bit suspenseful or shocking.” – the New York Post
“A fairly intriguing, moderately charming, but ultimately overlong and unsatisfying tale…. The story bogs down in the middle with too much drawing-room palaver and romantic intrigue.” – Sixties Shockers by Mark Clark and Bryan Senn
“The device [of the ‘fear flasher’ and ‘horror horn’] makes the mild horror that follows seem even milder.” –the (New York) World Journal Tribune
IT! (1967)
This has nothing whatsoever to do with Stephen King, and even less to do
with Clara Bow.
It! bears no resemblance to the 1950s potboilers It! The Terror From Beyond
Space (which inspired Alien) and It Conquered the World (which inspires guffaws)
– although the look of the title character here might be likened to the designs of
noted movie-monster maker Paul Blaisdell, who worked on both those earlier
titles, if Blaisdell had been a disciple of Alberto Giacometti.
Ads for It! hailed the flick as “Monster of the Year!” Perhaps the wrong year?
Motion pictures with which It! does have something in common are silents
released in Germany in 1914, 1917, and 1920 (all three starring 6-foot-6 Paul
Wegener), and a French work from 1936.
The five films’ plots all concern the “golem,” whose legend is in part synopsized in
It!: A 16th-century rabbi in Prague sculpted a humanlike form out of clay and
miraculously animated it, creating a killing machine to protect the Jews of the
ghetto from a pogrom. The 1967 feature’s dialogue relates that its golem is
“probably the most powerful force on Earth.” But the creature has “no reason or
will of its own” and can only obey orders. And if its power is used selfishly, the
being may run amok.
In this updating and downgrading of the legend, Pimm (Roddy McDowall), an assistant museum curator in London, lives with his mum, but she doesn’t live with him. She’s a sort of museum relic, à la Hitchcock. (Jumping ahead: A dream sequence, 55 minutes into It!, suggests the crux of the maternal relationship of Psycho’s Norman Bates.)
When a warehouse filled with artifacts is destroyed by fire, Pimm discovers the
only thing that’s survived the blaze: the long-lost golem (which soon doubles as an
umbrella and/or broom stand).
The heretofore lifeless 3,000-pound statue is put on exhibit at the museum. Its face
is “full of ’ate,” a worker observes.
Mayhem ensues. Nothing like a couple of mysterious deaths to drum up business
for the museum! Pimm, who has unrequited feelings for the curator’s daughter (Jill
Haworth), discovers the secret to animating the golem and becoming its master. He
then sets about siccing it on anyone who stands in the way of his ambitions.
Eventually, Pimm has a change of heart. He tries to destroy the golem, but, much
like the Mister Babadook book and other evil entities, it just keeps coming back.
A scene involving Hammersmith Bridge will bring to mind an old nursery song. It
will also bring to mind how cheap and shoddy this movie’s F/X are.
“You mean it was a sort of Frankenstein?” Pimm asks an American expert, Perkins
(!), regarding the golem. The German screen’s golem was certainly an influence on
Universal’s Frankenstein. “As the call, so the echo” – It! is Frankensteinian in
conception, especially the platform shoes (undoubtedly North Face).
The climax of the picture is extremely disjointed. And the ending is not quite as
original as it may seem. As per usual, the military is called upon to combat the
monster. They employ a tactic comparable to one used against the Martians in
1953’s War of the Worlds, with a similar result.
McDowall is portraying an overgrown kid (as well as a loony), and he apparently
reverts to the acting style he’d employed as a child star three decades earlier –
albeit more wooden. Simian fans know the actor in the roles of Cornelius and
Caesar in four movies from the original Planet of the Apes franchise. His other
genre credits include Bedknobs and Broomsticks, The Legend of Hell House,
Arnold, Embryo, Laserblast, The Cat From Outer Space, The Black Hole, the
Bradbury-based TV miniseries The Martian Chronicles, Fright Night, and Fright
Night II.
Haworth had a less impressive track record in horror: Though as a teen she had an
uncredited part in the estimable Brides of Dracula, she followed up with Horror
House (w. Frankie Avalon); Tower of Evil; and The Mutations (a.k.a. The
Freakmaker), a good-bad flick starring Donald Pleasence, Michael Dunn, and Tom
Baker. She costarred with David McCallum in the memorable Outer Limits episode “The Sixth Finger.”
New York-born Herbert J. Leder directed, wrote, and coproduced It! and an even
worse movie, The Frozen Dead, joining them in a double feature. Leder cowrote
the U.K.-made Fiend Without a Face (1959). That’s the one with the sometimes
invisible brain-and-spinal cord creatures.
“Some amusing touches to kiddie-oriented plot which becomes progressively more
ridiculous to thoroughly ludicrous conclusion.” – Castle of Frankenstein magazine
“With its infantile hero, the movie offers a confused mixture of horror and comedy,
succeeding in doing justice to neither tendency.” – Phil Hardy
“The golem has a very distinctive mien, which would best be described as a
sculpture of Zippy the Pinhead molded from half melted candle wax…. [In] the
final reel … the film spirals into pure lunacy.… I would have fancied the idea that
the director died shortly before completing the project, and his imaginative five
year old son with his own ideas of how the story should progress stepped in to
wrap it up.…” – Scott Stine
“The film just went totally to pieces.” – Roddy McDowall
THE SPIRITUALIST (1948; a.k.a. The Amazing Mr. X)
“Spirits don’t need any blood.”
The noirish picture is a primer on the methods that fake psychics have employed to manipulate and bilk their targets.
Beautiful, wealthy Christine (Lynn Bari) and younger sister Janet (Cathy O’Donnell) live together in an oceanside mansion. Christine was widowed two years earlier and is expecting a marriage proposal from lawyer Martin (Richard Carlson), whose home is nearby on the beach.
From her bedroom window, Christine believes she hears her dead husband’s voice on the wind. During a nighttime walk to Martin’s house, she “accidentally” bumps into so-called medium Alexis (Turhan Bey) and his pet raven. Alexis enthralls Christine by relating intimate facts about her life.
Believing that her late husband, Paul, might not wish her to remarry, she starts regularly consulting Alexis in an effort to contact Paul – much to the chagrin of Martin and Janet. The two call upon the services of a private detective, Hoffman, to dig up dirt on Alexis. Hoffman is the Amazing Randi of his day, a former magician who has been investigating fake spiritualists for two decades.
However, Janet, too, soon falls under Alexis’s spell.
In an ultimate twist, the title character finds himself the object of a ghostly encounter, and this is definitely a malevolent spirit.
Here are two flubs you’ll hear in the dialogue: At 0:51, Carlson accidentally uses his own character’s name, “Martin,” when referring to Paul. And at about 1:07, Martin mentions to Alexis an employee of Christine’s named Frieda, who isn’t mentioned elsewhere in the entire film (at least not the print I re-viewed) or in the IMDb credits list.
Speaking of credits: Carlson’s other horror/sci-fi features are Bob Hope’s The Ghost Breakers, Abbott and Costello’s Hold That Ghost, The Magnetic Monster, It Came From Outer Space, The Maze, Creature From the Black Lagoon, Riders to the Stars (which he codirected), Tormented, The Power, and The Valley of Gwangi.
Turhan Bey (1922-2012), born in Turkey to a Muslim father and Jewish (Czech) mother, thrilled us in The Mummy’s Tomb, Arabian Nights (1942; w. Maria Montez and Jon Hall), The Mad Ghoul, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (Montez and Hall again), Karloff’s The Climax, and (as Aesop) in Night in Paradise. It was a pleasant surprise to see him in the 1990s on two episodes of the S-F series Babylon 5.
Two of The Spiritualist’s bit-part actresses have Hitchcockian connections: Christine’s maid (who is actually Alexis’s inside woman) is Virginia Gregg, who appeared in Notorious and was the voice of Norman’s mother in Psycho and its first two latter-day sequels. Norma Varden plays one of Alexis’s rich dupes (“no brains and lots of money”); the British performer can be seen in Strangers on a Train. Both actresses appeared on Hitch’s TV series.
Director Bernard Vorhaus was blacklisted amid the McCarthyist anticommunist frenzy. But he’s gained my strict attention on two other occasions. The first was when I discovered he codirected the 1939 musical Way Down South, which had the singular distinction of being written by two African American men: Langston Hughes and Clarence Muse. Unfortunately, the story is still hemmed into the same black stereotypes that other Hollywood films were. The second revelation was Vorhaus’s direction of So Young, So Bad (1950), in which dedicated psychiatrist Paul Henreid counsels correctional facility delinquents Anne Francis, Anne Jackson, and Rita Moreno.
Spiritualist coscripter Crane Wilbur wrote the play on which Lon Chaney’s The Monster (TCM, Oct. 27) is based and did the screenplays for Vincent Price’s House of Wax (Oct. 31) and The Mad Magician. Wilbur updated a 1920 Mary Roberts Rinehart-Avery Hopwood play for another Price vehicle, 1959’s The Bat (Oct. 31), which Wilbur also directed. And he cowrote 1961’s The Mysterious Island.
“Some dollops of cynicism lend forcefulness to this dated shocker…” – Steven H. Scheuer
Cinematographer “John Alton evocatively lights and shoots the ‘effects’ scenes, and makes the light positively glisten on jewels, eyes, and Richard Carlson’s teeth…. But much of the movie is simply plot …” – Donald C. Willis [Alton won an Oscar for An American in Paris.]
Wilbur’s “story deftly combines realistic crime melodrama with the visual trappings of the supernatural ghost story. Alton’s use of day-for-night photography in the beach scenes creates a surreal luminous landscape of sky and sea that is perfect for the ghostly goings-on….” – Paul Meehan
“Undeservedly forgotten miniclassic…. This has dated qualities that now give it a nostalgic patina…. This documents the techniques of the phony-baloney medium: floating ectoplasm, ghostly music, spirit cabinets, etc.” – John Stanley
“Little of the story makes sense as it follows its own eerie, intuitive, incidental dream logic with dashes of self-puncturing comedy…. We watch this film because it’s wall-to-wall Alton, and his foggy, light-moted, soft-focused work here is spellbinding.” – Michael Barrett in PopMatters
THE BODY DISAPPEARS (1941)
Talk about being “dead drunk”!
Independently wealthy college man Peter DeHaven III (Jeffrey Lynn) is an inveterate prankster, so friends at his bachelor party decide to turn the tables on him. One guest, med student George, hatches the idea for an impractical joke: The men carry the inebriated, unconscious Peter from the nightclub and put him on a slab in the medical college dissecting room, thinking that when he wakes up, “it’ll scare the living daylights out of him,” and the other fellows would later get a big laugh.
But as fate would have it, near the college “morgue,” professor Reginald X. Shotesbury (Edward Everett Horton) is experimenting in his home laboratory with a formula that, he believes, will bring the dead back to life. However, he needs a human subject. So he and his servant, Willie (Willie Best), abscond with the still stupefied Peter from the slab to the lab, where Shotesbury shoots him up with the serum.
As was the case with penicillin and Viagra, a major discovery comes about by accident: The new drug unexpectedly renders Peter not immortal, but invisible.
Before long, Shotesbury’s daughter, Joan (Jane Wyman, Mrs. Reagan at the time), is smitten by Peter, who’s ready for a new relationship after his invisible self discovers his bride-to-be is not what she seems. Complications arise because Peter has been declared a missing person and Shotesbury is soon declared insane.
Nothing succeeds like ripping off another company’s success. This is a Warner Bros. production. By 1941, Universal had made three Invisible Person movies – starting with the 1933 classic – and there were three more to come, ending with 1951’s Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, among the duo’s finest.
At one point in The Body Disappears, Shotesbury gets the idea of creating an invisible army to protect the country from its enemies. Universal would use this concept in The Invisible Agent (1942), with Axis operatives seeking to steal the formula from the original Invisible Man’s grandson. It’s perhaps the worst of the Universal series, despite the presence of consummate villains Peter Lorre and Cedric Hardwicke.
Actually, Warners tops Universal, presenting an invisible woman and three invisible men in a single film. Spoiler: Willie Best foreshadows Ralph Ellison.
The F/X foreshadow the autonomous car.
In his 1942 New York Times review, noted critic Bosley Crowther referred to Best as “a drolly vapid blackamoor.” But in the company of the “Stepin Fetchit”-style comedians of yore, Willie Best was – well – among the best. Movie comedy pioneer Hal Roach deemed him one of the greatest talents with whom he’d worked. Usually doing what professor Robin R. Means Coleman calls a “coon performance” or “scared Negro” act, Best can be seen in Bob Hope’s The Ghost Breakers; The Monster Walks; The Smiling Ghost; Milton Berle’s Whispering Ghosts; Laurel and Hardy’s A-Haunting We Will Go; The Hidden Hand; the serial The Monster and the Ape; and a story dealing more “seriously” with reanimating the dead, The Face of Marble.
Left at the altar in The Body Disappears is Marguerite Chapman, who tread similar invisible territory in Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Amazing Transparent Man (1960). She was the female lead in the 1942 comic-book-based serial Spy Smasher and in 1951’s Flight to Mars.
The cast is a veritable cornucopia of future TV stars: Herbert Anderson (Dennis the Menace’s dad) is George; William Hopper (private investigator Paul Drake on Perry Mason) is another of Peter’s friends; Craig Stevens (Peter Gunn) is the would-be bride’s other man; Natalie Schafer (Lovey Howell on Gilligan’s Island; this marked the Broadway actress’s feature film debut) is her mother; John Hamilton (Perry White in The Adventures of Superman) is a criminal court judge. (The Body Disappear’s story unfolds in flashbacks during court testimonies.)
Scott Darling, who cowrote the script with Erna Lazarus, worked on Lon Chaney Jr.’s The Ghost of Frankenstein and Weird Woman.
Director D. Ross Lederman was a prop man for Fatty Arbuckle comedies, cut his teeth as a director with several Rin-Tin-Tin adventures, and made numerous “B” Westerns.
“Frantic, high-energy sci-fi farce.” – Leonard Maltin
“Trick photography makes for the slight burden of amusement there is…. There is little chance for acting in a show where the characters are rarely present.” – Howard Barnes, The New York Herald Tribune
“Its presentation is as labored as its plot. ‘The Body Disappears’ has a college for background, a millionaire bridegroom for hero, an erratic professor for added comedy, the professor’s daughter for romance, and a bad script to tie them altogether.... ‘The Body Disappears’ is a heavy-handed piece.” – Eileen Creelman, The (New York) Sun
“A synthetic piece of fooling. The story tries to strike a new note on the theme by having three [sic] humans and a monkey do the disappearing act, but even this prodigality of invisibility isn’t enough to make this latest comedy from the Warner Brothers’ studio anything but mild entertainment…. There’s very little bubbling over the lines and the situations often fall decidedly flat.” – Kate Cameron, the (New York) Daily News
“Mystery intent is vague and comedy effect rather mild.” – Variety
“Daffy little forced comedy in the Topper tradition but not in the same league.” – Steven H. Scheuer
“The happenings … open an enchanting vista for the treatment of movie stars deserving immediate oblivion.” – Archie Winsten, the New York Post
THE WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL (1959)
“Why should the world fall down to prove I’m what I am, and that there’s nothing wrong with what I am?”
The title comes from The Book of Common Prayer’s description of “the three enemies of the soul.”
Ralph (black recording star Harry Belafonte) is a Pennsylvania mine inspector, solitarily checking water seepage underground, when a cave-in nearly drowns him and traps him below. He can hear rescuers digging for him for five days, then they suddenly stop. He manages to get out of the mine on his own, but something is desperately wrong.
No one is in the mining camp. No one is in the town. No one is anywhere. There’s no phone service, and no stations can be heard on the radio.
Old newspaper headlines reveal what has occurred: “U.N. Retaliates for Use of Atomic Poison / World Doomed, States Dying President.” “Millions Flee From Cities. End of the World.”
Ralph hot-wires a car and makes his way from western Pennsylvania to Manhattan – also apparently deserted. “What are you hiding from me for? What did I do?” he screams to the empty buildings as he searches.
Soon he gets more insights into the global calamity, from audiotapes at broadcast station WKYL: Clouds of “radioactive sodium isotopes,” unleashed by an unknown nation, were the cause – fatal for “about five days.”
He becomes the sole tenant in an apartment building. For company, he has two (Caucasian) mannequins. “You look at me, but you don’t see me,” he tells the dummies. “You don’t see me, and you wouldn’t care if you did.”
He repairs a generator and relights a small area.
Eventually, another survivor, Sarah (Inger Stevens), reveals herself to Ralph. (She lived on by entering a compression chamber until the danger had passed.)
He helps Sarah, making sure she, too, has electricity, and connecting a phone between their abodes.
Ah, but what of the future for these two?
Sarah seems to be the one to say “go go go,” while Ralph says “no no no.” For instance, she wants to move to the same apartment building, to make things easier, but he doesn’t wish her to do so. (“This brought in a painful patronizing note,” says author Bill Warren.)
“I need you, Ralph Burton,” she tells him. But he avoids her for lengthy stretches.
Then Sarah sights a third survivor, Ben (Mel Ferrer), floating in on a watercraft. He is deathly ill. Should Ralph let the white dude die? Nope. We have to spur the plot along.
Sarah is extremely angered because the two men seek to decide her future for her.
And Ben, as Time magazine called him, is a “particularly amiable snake” in this Eden. He turns out to have a kill-or-be-killed mentality.
Various writers posit that Ralph is the world, Sarah is the flesh, and Ben is the devil.
The original resolution of the picture was different, and undoubtedly made more sense than the implausible and open-ended conclusion that MGM forced upon the moviemakers.
Belafonte later said the script was originally “written … for two white guys, and the metaphor was laborer versus capitalist.”
As you might guess, this was a flop. Some theaters in the segregrated South refused to show it. (In 1957, another Belafonte drama, Island in the Sun, which has an interracial theme, caused outrage: KKK members picketed a Jacksonville, Fla., theater that was showing the film, and a cross was burned in front of a Greensboro, N.C., drive-in.)
TWtF&tD was a bold endeavor for the late 1950s. But some of the dialogue now seems silly. E.g., Sarah telling Ralph: “I’ll never get married now, will I? No matter what happens, I won’t get married. ’Cause there’s nobody left to marry anybody [cries].” And Ralph responding, “We’ll find somebody for you – somebody to marry, I mean.... There must be others. We’ll find somebody, and I’ll do the marriage. I’ll be the mayor.” (And this, ironically, from two actors who were to be in interracial marriages – though Stevens, in the 1960s, felt compelled to keep hers a secret.)
Robert H. Justman, a producer of the original Star Trek and Next Generation, was assistant director for the New York sequences of TWtF&tD. In an interview with critic Glenn Erickson, Justman related that shooting in Manhattan was meticulously done in predawn hours – sometimes for a trice of only a few minutes per take. The forsaken sites include the Empire State Building, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Times Square, the U.N. building (with its quote from Isaiah 2:4), and Wall Street.
(The Wall Street sequences look particularly eerie to someone who worked for two business journals in that hallowed neighborhood for a total of 15½ years.) Of course, worm’s-eye views of skyscrapers and skillfully rendered mattes were used. In early shots, the George Washington Bridge and the Lincoln Tunnel are cluttered with abandoned cars.
Civil rights activist Belafonte (1927-2023), the “King of Calypso” who was at the pinnacle of international fame in ’59, coproduced the film, during which he offers three songs.
Stockholm-born Stevens may be best-known for the sitcom The Farmer’s Daughter (1963-66), in which she portrayed the Swedish governess of a widowed U.S. representative’s two sons. She made news in early January 1959, four months before the motion picture’s release, by attempting suicide. It still saddens me that she succeeded in 1970, at age 35.
Ferrer, who was of Cuban and Irish lineage, was the male lead in Lost Boundaries (1949), a fact-based story of a black family in New Hampshire who passed for white. He starred in Blood and Roses (1960), Roger Vadim’s rendition of Le Fanu’s Carmilla; in the remake of The Hands of Orlac (1960; w. Christopher Lee); and in two horrors called Eaten Alive – one directed by Tobe Hooper (1976), and one by Umberto Lenzi (1980). In Italy, he did The Antichrist, The Visitor, and Lenzi’s Nightmare City. At the time TWtF&tD was made, Ferrer was married to Audrey Hepburn.
Director/writer Ranald R. MacDougall (husband of stage and screen actress Nanette Fabray) is credited with the screenplay of Mildred Pierce, and he contributed to the Taylor-Burton Cleopatra script. MacDougall had directed Stevens in Man on Fire (1957), in which she played the bitterly divorced Bing Crosby’s rebound.
TWtF&tD’s score is by three-time Oscar winner Miklós Rózsa.
As the opening credits inform us, the picture was “suggested by” (not adapted from, not based on) a 1901 first-person novel, The Purple Cloud, by British author M.P. Shiel. The global catastrophe in the literary work is caused by poison gas (which smells like peach blossoms) originating from a North Pole volcano. TWtF&tD has little to do with the book, whose characters are all of European ancestry. The main element the postapocalyptic novel and film have in common is a lone (for most of the book, but not most of the movie) survivor’s wanderings through lifeless places (filled, in the book but not the movie, with corpses). Shiel’s character’s name is (you guessed it!) Adam, and he travels the world alone for two decades. He’s a doctor and, like Ralph, is technically adroit. In the 1901 work, seeking survival in mines has proved futile for some of the dead. And the living young woman companion whom Adam ultimately finds in Stamboul (Istanbul), unlike Inger Stevens, is naked. Like Hammer Film’s These Are the Damned (which TCM screened earlier this month), the novel quotes the Byronic poem “The Prisoner of Chillon.”
I offer one unrelated line from Shiel’s Adam (p. 143), with no context whatsoever: “‘White Power shall not prevail,’ said I.”
“The film has some remarkably effective sequences, enough, in fact, to stock a half dozen run-of-the-mill phantasies.” – the New York Herald Tribune
“A passionately sincere, pictorially brilliant, monumentally silly example of how people who are obsessed with the race question tend to see everything in Black and White.” – Time magazine
“The performances all express the urgency of the situation, but the film soon gets bogged down in its own traps and plot holes.” ─ The Motion Picture Guide by Jay Robert Nash and Stanley Ralph Ross
“Social distinctions and mating are considered in the most conventional terms, and a potentially fascinating contemplation of a unique sociological change is discarded in favor of a cliché: two men and a girl on a desert isle.” – Bosley Crowther, The New York Times
“Today, it’s hard to take the film seriously, particularly because of its patronizing, naive view of the racial question.… The ending … is a question-dodging cop-out.” – Bill Warren (2016)
“A disappointing, unimaginative and unreasonable view of the problems of race and nuclear war.” – Frank W. Oglesbee
“More notable for its pretensions than its convictions.” ─ the Monthly Film Bulletin, a former British Film Institute publication
“Segregationist southerners and the South African government will be heartened to know that even in a relatively empty world, the race problem continues.” – Hollis Alpert
“Race relations become pure gimmickry…. Today this 1959 film is slightly dated sociologically.” – Judith Crist (1974)
“The World, the Flesh, the Devil [sic] … promised to deal frankly and provocatively with the theme of interracial love. But in the end, the filmmakers lost their nerve. In the Eisenhower era, interracial love was a topic the movies were both fascinated by and frightened of.” – Donald Bogle
Two very different interpretations of Mary Shelley’s monster maker and his creation, but each, in its own way, was a landmark of horror cinema:
FRANKENSTEIN (1931)
This was Karloff’s 81st movie, according to his daughter, Sara. (He made his first in 1919.) Also starring Colin Clive, Mae Clarke (she of the famous Cagney grapefruit in the face), and Edward Van Sloan. Dwight Frye (1899-1943) – who appeared in all the sequels through Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man – is the scientist’s hunchbacked, sadistic assistant Fritz.
The 1931 film was one of the biggest moneymakers up until that time.
Jack Pierce (born Janus Piccoulas), an immigrant from Greece, was head of Universal’s makeup department – and manager of the studio’s basketball team. He created the iconic looks of Frankenstein, the Mummy, and all the rest of the classic Universal monsters of the ’30s and ’40s, and he called Karloff “the greatest of them all as far as playing these parts.”
TCM will rerun Frankenstein on Halloween.
“Frankenstein is a thriller, make no mistake. Women come out trembling, men exhausted.” — Motion Picture Herald, a former trade paper
“A classic, the most famous and possibly the most influential genre film ever made … [Director James Whale] creates an effectively oppressive Gothic atmosphere but his handling of non-horror scenes and his apparent lack of interest in the romantic leads, as well as his tendency to allow Colin Clive to over-act at key moments, tends to dissipate the overall effect.” — Alan G. Frank
“Historically, Frankenstein may be the most important of all horror films. The ersatz Victorian flavor of Dracula is nowhere to be found in this work, the first truly modern horror film. Along with its thematic qualities and bravura theatrics, Whale’s film pioneered much of the horror form in its unadorned use of shock cutting and shock for shock’s sake.” – Ken Hanke
“Boris Karloff’s fiercely sensitive portrayal — a master class in bewilderment and paranoia — remains unmatched in the history of horror.” — Slate magazine (2012)
“So thoroughly mixed with water as to have a horror content of about .0001 percent…. The film … soon turns into a sort of comic opera with a range of cardboard mountains over which extras in French Revolution costumes dash about with flaming torches.” – Creighton Peet (a children’s author) in Outlook & Independent, a former New York-based weekly magazine (1931)
Trivia time: Karloff got the role after Bela Lugosi turned it down – or was fired (sources vary). Leslie Howard and Bette Davis were considered for the parts of Henry Frankenstein and his fiancée, Elizabeth.
THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1957)
This is the milestone – directed by Terence Fisher, penned by Jimmy Sangster, and shot in Eastmancolour – that started the horror ball rolling for Hammer Film, which had been around since the ’30s.
But I can’t heartily recommend the first of the Hammer reboots of classic Universal monster movies, which also marked the first of many Hammer teamings† of Peter Cushing (Victor Frankenstein) and Christopher Lee (the mute Monster). It’s not very good, by Hammer standards or by any other measure.
Take heed of the words of Cushing, co-narrator with Lee of the at times very funny documentary Flesh and Blood: The Hammer Heritage of Horror (1994), as he refers to the making of TCoF:
“The first day I met Christopher, he was disappointed that he hadn’t any dialogue. I told him, ‘Consider yourself lucky. I’ve read the script.’”
TCM will again screen Curse of Frankenstein on Oct. 30.
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† I say “Hammer teamings” (though the pair would later appear together in other studios’ productions as well) to qualify this statement, since Cushing and Lee were both in the casts of two earlier motion pictures: Olivier’s 1948 Hamlet, and Huston’s 1952 Moulin Rouge. But Lee was still a struggling unknown in the mid-1950s. Lee remarked, “Hammer wanted a big, tall guy who could act without speaking. Frankly, I hadn’t had much of a chance to do anything else in films up to then!”
Concerning the actor who plays Frankenstein’s reluctant assistant: “Robert Urquhart … [was] offended when he first saw the finished print, walking out halfway through the film’s premiere and vowing never again to appear in a horror movie.” – Monstrous Progeny: A History of the Frankenstein Narratives, by Lester D. Friedman and Allison B. Kavey
“This is the ugh-est film I’ve ever seen.” – the (London) Daily Herald
“Among the half-dozen most repulsive films I have encountered in the course of some 10,000 miles of film reviewing.” – C.A. (Caroline Alice) Lejeune in The Observer
“By comparison, an abattoir is a rather friendly place.” – the Sunday Express
“Depressing, degrading – for all lovers of the cinema only two words describe this film.” – the (London) Tribune
“Most of the critics talked about the vile mind of Jimmy Sangster .... It was all quite extraordinary.” – Sangster
“Fisher’s Frankenstein epitomizes a civilization in dissolution, a culture witnessing the collapse of its own tottering belief system.” – the Rev. Paul Leggett
“The vital thing – the really new thing – was that Jimmy Sangster and Terence Fisher portrayed a world in which violence was met with no answering sense of redemption.” – Sinclair McKay in A Thing of Unspeakable Horror: The History of Hammer Films
“The leitmotif of the film is blood; more accurately, the color of blood.... The Curse of Frankenstein … is suffused with scarlet.” – Denis Meikle
“We wanted a thing which looked like some wandering, forlorn minstrel of monstrosity, a thing of shreds and patches, but in flesh and blood and organs.” – Terence Fisher, speaking of the monster’s new look (created by makeup artist Philip Leakey; Christopher Lee said the monster resembled “a walking road accident”)
“The film’s humour is sophisticated rather than camp.” – Horror! The Definitive Companion to the Most Terrifying Movies Ever Made, by Kim Newman and James Marriott
Dr. Frankenstein is played “to icy perfection by Peter Cushing.... Hammer’s brand new Baron was something genre films hadn’t seen before. No simple mad scientist, he is the ultimate narcissist – cold, ruthless, remorseless – and a murderer to boot.... He is the monster of the film.” – John McCarty
“Curse of Frankenstein takes the vitality of Mary Shelley’s timeless story and submerges it in a laborious faux-Dickensian universe. Even touches of the Burke and Hare and Sweeney Todd stories cannot raise this foul behemoth off the ground.... Honestly, the only good this film ever accomplished was to provide an amusing clip for Stanley Kubrick’s classic black comedy Lolita (1962).” – It Came From 1957 by Rob Craig [P.S. Lolita also interpolates a clip of Hammer’s remake The Mummy, to be screened on TCM Oct. 20.]
“The devil said to him, ‘Go on with your work. You’re wonderful. Do anything. Create a creature better than God’s. You’re better than God.’ That, I think, comes out marvelously in Peter’s performances.” – Fisher, sizing up Dr. Frankenstein in general
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Trivia time:
⏺New York-born Max Rosenberg and Milton Subotsky had produced only one feature, Rock Rock Rock! (starring Alan Freed, Chuck Berry, and other music icons), which Subotsky cowrote, at the time they approached another New York native, Eliot Hyman, with an idea for a new adaptation of Frankenstein. Hyman, the silent partner of Hammer chief James Carreras and the future chairman of Warner Brothers-Seven Arts, approached Carreras with the idea. Ultimately, both Carreras and Hyman were dissatisfied with neophytes Rosenberg’s and Subotsky’s work and let them go. Undaunted, the pair moved to England and formed Hammer’s horror rival Amicus Productions, specializing in anthology films like 1965’s Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors (starring Cushing and Lee), 1972’s Tales From the Crypt, and 1974’s From Beyond the Grave (both with Cushing), which ran on TCM earlier this month.
⏺The cuss of Frankenstein? Copyrights precluded makeup man Philip Leakey from creating anything remotely resembling Universal’s 1931 monster. Leakey’s concoction applied to Lee’s face during the actor’s grueling time in the makeup chair included mortician’s wax. According to Making a Monster by Al Taylor and Sue Roy, Lee said to Leakey that he thought he’d never look the same again. Quoted by Little Shoppe of Horrors magazine, Leakey commented, “[Lee] told me things about my ancestors that I would have never guessed.”