Saturday, January 30, 1971: The Black Cat (1934) / House of Horrors (1946)

Synopsis: Mystery writer Peter Allison (David Manners) and his newly-minted wife Joan (Julie Bishop) are honeymooning in eastern Europe. On a train trip east, they are unexpectedly asked to share their compartment with a stranger, Dr. Vitus Werdergast (Bela Lugosi). Werdegast tells them that he had been in a Russian prison camp until recently, but now he is on his way to visit an old friend. The man seems haunted by Joan's beauty, telling her that she reminds him of his own late wife.
At their destination, Werdegast and the Allisons agree to share a taxi. The driver entertains the newlyweds by telling them that the area they are driving past was the site of an old fortress, where 10,000 men died in a fierce battle with the Russians during the Great War. To the couple this is mildly interesting history, but Werdegast stares out the window darkly, and it is clear that for him this story is all too personal.

Suddenly part of the rain-washed road gives way and the taxi plunges down an embankment. The driver is killed in the crash, and Joan is knocked unconscious. Werdegast, his manservant and Peter take her to the futuristic house built on the ruins of the old fortress.

This is the house built by Hjalmar Poelzig (Boris Karloff), one of the world's greatest architects and the man whom Werdegast has traveled so far to visit. Poelzig had once commanded the fortress the house was built upon, and it quickly becomes clear that Werdegast's visit is not entirely a social call. During the war, Poelzig had allowed his men to be taken captive by the Russians in exchange for his own safe passage. And Poelzig had taken Werdegast's wife Karin with him. He had told her that Werdegast had been killed so that he could marry her and raise Werdegast's daughter as his own.

Wedegast treats Joan's injuries, telling Peter that she will be all right after a good night's sleep. He gives her a sedative. Peter and Werdegast are talking to Poelzig when Werdegast sees a black cat. Werdegast becomes hysterical and kills it. Poelzig explains to Peter that Werdegast has always suffered from a debilitating fear of cats.

Joan comes downstairs. She seems different than before -- more somber and sharp-eyed. When Peter takes her back upstairs she kisses him hungrily. Wedegast explains that the narcotic he has given Joan is known to cause incidents of expanded perception, even second sight.

Later that night, Poelzig tells Werdegast he will take him to Karin. The two go into the lower levels of the house, which are built upon the old fortress ruins. Poelzig leads him to a glass case, where Karin is kept. Poelzig tells him that she died of pneumonia shortly after the war. But he has kept her body perfectly preserved so that he may always look upon her beauty. The child, he tells Werdegast, died about the same time.

Enraged, Werdegast draws a pistol, but Poelzig mocks him for his "childish" and "melodramatic" impulses. Realizing that this isn't yet the proper time to exact revenge, Werdegast stands down.

Returning to his bedroom, Poelzig tells the woman lying next to him that he wants her to remain hidden from the visitors in the house. It is only then that we see the woman looks exactly like Karin -- she is, in fact, Werdegast's long-lost daughter....

Comments: Tonight we are treated to a top-notch double feature -- the best, in fact, that Horror Incorporated has offered to date. First up is Edgar G. Ulmer's The Black Cat, a florid and highly stylized thriller that makes great use of its two stars, Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. From the very beginning, the movie is out to buck convention. It is a horror film set not in a crumbling castle but in a gleaming modernist house; while most films of the era had almost no music, this one has few moments without it; and while most horror films of this type were set in the distant past, this one is set in modern times, with a revenge subplot rising from the blood-soaked battlefields of the Great War.

The mood it creates is very effective, and while modern viewers are likely to see it as tame stuff, in its day it was seen as having an unsavory focus on torture and cruelty. "Clammy and excessively ghoulish," complained the New York Times when the film premiered in May of 1934. "'The Black Cat' is more foolish than horrible. The story and dialogue pile the agony on too thick to give the audience a reasonable scare." Time Magazine groused, " A dismal hocus-pocus which seems to confuse its actors as much as it fails to frighten its audience.....cinema's two outstanding blood-curdlers deserve a better vehicle than The Black Cat".


Variety, as you might expect, had the funniest take on the movie, writing "Clash of the two eyebrow-squinting nuts involves an American bridal couple temporarily caught in the manor. It is the playful notion of nasty Karloff to make the bride Exhibit A in a devil cult of which he is the head, and it is the revenge of Lugosi to torture his enemy by skinning him alive". Ah, good times.

As often happens, audiences ignored the wisdom of the film critics, and The Black Cat was a hit at the box office. It's regarded as a classic of the horror genre, and rightly so -- not only does it successfully create an atmosphere of wonder and foreboding, it successfully captures the spirit of Poe even as it entirely discards the story it's ostensibly based upon. Heavy on mood and imagery and short on plot, this is the sort of film I can imagine Poe falling in love with, going to see again and again.

I like to think that Poe would have been a great fan of the movies. He was just born a hundred years too late.

House of Horrors


Synopsis: A spectacularly unsuccessful sculptor named Marcel De Lange (Martin Kosleck) is dining on bread and cheese by candlelight. It's bread and cheese because he doesn't have anything else to eat; and it's by candlelight because the electricity in his loft has been shut off. But he is in good spirits because a wealthy patron of the arts is coming over soon to buy his latest creation for $1,000.

But when the patron arrives, he is accompanied by a supercilious art critic named F. Holmes Harmon (Alan Napier) who insults the work and implores the buyer not to go through with it. The sale is ruined.

Despondent, De Lange walks down to the river bridge. He is about to throw himself in when he sees a half-drowned man surface near the riverbank. He goes down to help the large, ungainly fellow out of the water, and returns to the loft, where he nurses him back to health.

He sees this man as "the perfect Neanderthal" and is inspired to create a new sculpture of his primitive cranium. It turns out that the stranger is an escaped murderer called The Creeper (Rondo Hatton), and his m.o. is to snap his victim's spines. The police believe he is dead, and at first it isn't clear to De Lange what sort of man he's taken into his home.

But it becomes clear soon enough: The Creeper murders a streetwalker in the neighborhood (because "she screamed", as the Creeper succinctly explains), and when De Lange angrily reads Harmon's snarky write-up of his foiled sale, The Creeper gets up and leaves.

Meanwhile, reporter Joan Medford (Virginia Grey) visits her colleague F. Holmes Harmon. She is upset that Harmon plans to write a savage review of her boyfriend Steven Morrow (Robert Lowery) and his planned exhibit of commercial illustrations (pinups, which appear to be Morrow's speciality). Harmon finds pop art in general to be contemptible, and Morrow's work particularly vulgar; he is determined to ruin Morrow with another poison-pen letter to the art world.

Enter the Creeper. He kills Harmon and slips away. Because Harmon was working on a hit piece against Morrow when he died, police suspicion falls on him.

De Lange realizes that all he need do is express contempt for an art critic -- or anyone, really -- and hey presto, he reads that person's obituary in the next day's paper. Bringing the Creeper into his life has given him an incredible feeling of power, and if that weren't enough, his sculpture of the Creeper is going well -- in fact, we suspect it's the first decent piece of art he's ever created.

As the body count rises, Medford visits De Lange's loft. She says she is looking for a story for her Sunday column -- but is she? Why does she steal a sketch of the Creeper that De Lange has hidden? And what will happen to her when he --and the Creeper -- find out?

Comments: It's hard to imagine a more interesting counterpoint to The Black Cat than Jean Yarbrough's House of Horrors, coming as it does from the end rather than the beginning of Universal's "golden age of horror". Ulmer's film benefited from lavish production values, a tone borrowed from the German expressionist films of the 1920s and the presence of Karloff and Lugosi, two actors then at the peak of their careers. House of Horrors had no stars, and was shot in the most straightforward and pedestrian way possible, and its overall look and feel suggests the lowest of low-budget Universal features of the time.

And yet House of Horrors is in its way just as lurid and disturbing as the better-known Ulmer classic.

Perhaps this is due to the presence of Rondo Hatton himself, whose acromegaly is displayed for the paying audience in a way that reminds us too keenly that all horror films are freak shows in sanitized packages: we're separated from the grotesques by a glowing screen, but all the same we lay down our money and can't stop gawking. And perhaps part is due to the fact that the Creeper, casually presented to us as the logical successor to Dracula and Frankenstein and the Wolf Man, isn't anything like them. The Creeper claims no supernatural origin, nor does he have any claim to our sympathy.

Sympathy is what we must feel for the great screen monsters, sooner or later; they have become what they are through no fault of their own, and we can imagine a time when these creatures were like us.

We should have no such illusions about the Creeper. It's difficult to imagine a time when he wasn't a remorseless killer.

In his place we have Marcel DeLange, a talent-free sculptor whose failures and humiliations have led him to the brink of suicide. The Creeper arrives just in time to give him a reason to carry on -- providing him not only with an artistic muse, but with a vehicle for revenge. The moral choice in this film is assumed entirely by DeLange, and he does not hesitate: his rage and bitterness, strong as they were, were never stronger than his moral cowardice. But the Creeper gives him a way to exact revenge, and DeLange clearly believes that he needn't pay the moral price because he never explicitly asks the Creeper to commit murder -- he simply wishes openly for the death of someone in the presence of the Creeper, and the deed is as good as done. He's off the hook!

But DeLange is wrong. He is on the hook, all the way on, and the moral price always gets paid. We know this because we're watching a horror film, and horror films have rules, but DeLange is unaware of the rules.

DeLange's ignorance, of course, his greatest liability -- just as Werdegast and Poelzig's greatest liability is their too-great knowledge of the moral precipice they have reached. Werdegast and Poelzig had each clearly made a decision - long before the events of the movie began - that when the time came he would take the other guy with him. That's great dramatic stuff, but for House of Horrors it never occurs to either character to take the other guy with him. Not until it's too late.

Saturday, January 23, 1971: House of Frankenstein (1946) / The Invisible Man Returns (1940)

Synopsis: In Neustadt prison, mad scientist Dr. Niemann and his hunchbacked assistant Daniel are unexpectedly freed when a wall of their cell collapses during a violent thunderstorm. The two happen upon Lampini's traveling horror show, which boasts as its main attraction the skeleton of Count Dracula. Neimann and Eric quickly murder Lampini and his driver and take their places. Niemann has been obsessed with proving the genius of Dr. Frankenstein and he sets out to the village where the Monster was created.

Niemann discovers that the skeleton of Dracula is authentic when he removes the stake that had been thrust through the vampire's heart. The skeleton promptly transforms into the Count. Threatening to replace the stake if Dracula doesn't do his bidding, Niemann sends the vampire out to kill the three men who had him imprisoned: Strauss, Ullman and Hussman. Dracula kills Hussman but dies before he can dispense with the hated Strauss and Ullman.

Reaching the village of Vasaria, they encounter a band of gypsies. Seeing a gypsy woman Ilonka being abused, Daniel saves her and, smitten with her, asks her to join them.

Later, examining the ruins of Frankenstein Castle, Neimann and Daniel discover the frozen bodies of Frankenstein's Monster and the Wolf Man. Niemann realizes that the Monster can be revived, and he plans to place the Monster's brain in Lawrence Talbot's body; Talbot's brain in Strauss' body, and Ullman's brain in the Monster's body. But discovering that the Ilonka has fallen in love with Lawrence Talbot, Daniel wants his own brain placed into Talbot's body....

Comments: Almost exactly thirty minutes after House of Frankenstein begins, the movie abruptly ends.

Well, sort of. Dr. Niemann and his assistant Daniel realize that the authorities who are pursuing them don't really want Lampini's carriage, which they've stolen. Nope, they are after Count Dracula, whom Niemann has sworn to protect. So Niemann jettisons Dracula and his coffin from the carriage. The count is caught out in the open, and can't climb inside his downed coffin quickly enough (morning comes quickly in the Carpathian mountains, you know) and he is destroyed by sunlight.

At that moment, Dracula's ring falls off the finger of young Rita Hussman, and she and her husband hold each other close and stare off into the distance together. The music swells, we see a shot of Lampini's carriage winding away into the distance, and we fade to black.

A moment later we fade in to find Lampini's carriage rolling along toward that hard-luck village of Vasaria. It is here that we'll meet the gypsy girl Ilonka and return again to the ruins of Castle Frankenstein. But it is this first, false ending that gives us the strange feeling that we're seeing a "compilation film", that is, a film cobbled together from episodes of an old TV series.

It would have been amusing if that were true -- a movie assembled, Frankenstein-style, from the corpses of other movies.

Truth is, House of Frankenstein would have made a pretty interesting TV series - each week Niemann and Daniel would travel to a different Carpathian village, meeting up with a new monster every week. Niemann, besides wanting revenge on Ullman, Hussman and Strauss, would always be looking for an opportunity to replicate Dr. Frankenstein's research; meanwhile, Daniel wants love, and / or a new body. Each week they would come thiiiis close to success but it would always elude them. Sort of Wagon Train meets Kolchak: The Night Stalker.

I would have made one hell of a TV executive.

Unfortunately, it's supposed to be a movie, no matter how much my mind keeps trying to twist it into a TV show. So we have to judge it on that basis, and on that basis it doesn't work very well. I generally dislike the Universal monster rallies, and this one is probably the most disagreeable of them all.

The Invisible Man Returns

Synopsis: At the Radcliffe family estate, a grim vigil is being kept for young Geoffrey Radcliffe (Vincent Price), who has been convicted of the murder of his brother Michael. The family is certain that Geoffrey is innocent; nevertheless he has been convicted of the crime and is sentenced to be hanged at 8:00 am.
Geoffrey's cousin Richard Cobb (Cedric Hardwicke) is trying to console Geoffrey's fiance Helen (Nan Grey) but she is despondent until the arrival of Dr. Frank Griffin (John Sutton). Learning that Cobb's last-ditch appeal for a reprieve has failed, Griffin hurries to the prison to meet Radcliffe one last time.


Shortly after Griffin's visit, Radcliffe mysteriously disappears from his cell, even though it is closely guarded. The prison officials are baffled, but as soon as Inspector Sampson (Cecil Kellaway) of Scotland Yard hears the name Frank Griffin, he is certain he knows what has happened.

An invisible Geoffrey moves through the woods some distance from the prison, finding a suitcase that has been left for him. He pulls clothing from it and proceeds to a safe house arranged by Frank Griffin.

Visiting the lab on the grounds of the Radcliffe family's coal mine, Sampson shows Griffin a police file of his brother, John Griffin, who nine years earlier formulated a chemical that could turn a man invisible, and then tested it on himself with disastrous results. But Griffin insists he has nothing to do with his brother's work.

Reunited with Helen at the safe house, Radcliffe rests for a while. But the house owners's dog barks ceaselessly, attracting the attention of the police, and Radcliffe is forced to flee.

Discovering that hapless mine employee Willy Spears (Alan Napier) has suddenly been promoted makes Radcliffe suspicious, especially when Spears tells Griffin that the lab will soon be shut down. Radcliffe uses his power of invisibility to track down the ones who framed him for murder, while Griffin desperately seeks an antidote to the invisibility drug -- knowing that if he fails, Radcliffe will go insane....

Comments: The Invisible Man Returns is so much better than House of Frankenstein that I spent some time wondering why it turned up as the second feature on Horror Incorporated, and not the first.

It seems pretty obvious that, on a creature feature, you want to present your best picture first, because your peak audience will be with you at the start of the show, slowly draining away as the night wears on.

Of course when these movies were first released in theaters, the opposite was true: the less desirable "B" picture was seen first, forcing the audience to stick around for the "A" picture at the end.

This had been the rule since the dawn of the talkies and it continued until 1948, when two earthshaking events conspired to end the era of the theatrical double bill.

The first was the landmark Supreme Court decision United States V. Paramount Pictures, which essentially decided that the vertically-integrated movie industry held too much control over its distribution channels. Direct studio ownership of theater chains was outlawed as a result, and so was "block booking" -- the practice of forcing theaters to book a movie they didn't want in order to get a movie they did. Block booking was not only how most "B" pictures got into theaters, it was to a large extent their raison d'etre. United States V. Paramount was also designed to prevent studios from discriminating against independently-owned cinemas.

Of course, the decision didn't do much to solve the problems the Court thought it was solving at the time (today, block booking still happens, though not as blatantly as it once did; theaters are owned by giant chains that are all in bed with the studios; and independent cinemas are still discriminated against by the studios). But the decision was at least partially responsible for the unraveling of the vertically-integrated studio system.

I say partially because the second earthshaking event was happening right around the same time. This, of course, was the advent of television. After decades of experimentation, a national technological standard for TV broadcasts was established in 1941. World War II froze the planned rollout of television and it wasn't until 1947 that sets were being manufactured and purchased in significant numbers.

The existence of this giant new entertainment pipeline forced the film industry to become more efficient; double bills were one of the first casualties (for the next couple of decades, some small producers like AIP were able to continue offering double features for distribution, but only because they could make two movies for a lower price than the major studios could make one.

Which brings us right around again to the late 1950s, the Shock! package and the advent of the late night creature feature.

The Invisible Man Returns stands up very well today; this is partly due to the intelligent, suspenseful script, and partly due to an extraordinarily talented cast and the sure hand of veteran director Joe May, a grouchy German expat who gave Fritz Lang his start in the business. May wasn't well-liked by the casts he worked with, but you can't argue with his results -- this is a great little film.

Saturday, January 16, 1971: The Black Room (1935) / The Man With Nine Lives (1940)

Synopsis: In a Tyrolean fiefdom, a baron anxiously awaits the birth of an heir. But he is greatly distressed to learn that his wife has given birth to twins. An old family prophecy holds that one day twins will be born to the family, and that the younger twin will murder the older in the onyx-lined "black room" of the castle. Fearful of the prophecy, the baron orders that the entrance to the room be bricked up.

Some forty years later, we find the older twin Gregor ruling as baron. He is a cruel and dissolute tyrant, hated by his subjects, and he is suspected in the disappearances of several young women. But the local authorities turn a blind eye to his activities.

The younger twin Anton (Boris Karloff) is a nice but somewhat ineffectual fellow, and has been away since his brother's rule began. At Gregor's invitation, Anton returns home.

At first Anton refuses to believe the rumors about Gregor, but it soon becomes clear to him that his older brother is every bit as cruel and despotic as the locals allege.

When Gregor is implicated in the disappearance of Mashka, a gypsy serving girl, the townspeople rise up. They storm the castle and demand Gregor be handed over to them.

To everyone's surprise, Gregor tells the townspeople that he will relinquish his authority immediately and turn it over to his younger brother Anton. This mollifies the crowd and Anton becomes the new baron.

While acquainting Anton with his new duties, Gregor shows him an interesting trick: inside the huge fireplace in the main hall there is a secret passage that leads into the Black Room. Gregor reveals that he has been there many times, and that there is a pit beneath the room. When Anton looks down into the pit, he sees a number of bodies that have been thrown down there -- including the body of the missing girl Mashka. Gregor strikes Anton and tosses him down into the pit as well.

As Anton dies, Gregor taunts him. He reminds him that, according to the prophecy, Anton was supposed to kill Gregor in that room. "The prophesy will be fulfilled!" Anton insists. "From the grave?" Gregor asks sarcastically. "Yes," Anton says as he dies. "From the grave!"

Emerging from the Black Room, Gregor now assumes the identity of Anton, able to rule again while being absolved of all his past crimes. Yet Anton's dying words keep coming back to him...

Comments: Horror Incorporated returns to the Saturday evening schedule with an interesting pair of films that Boris Karloff made for Columbia Pictures. The first was released in 1935, when the Englishman was still enjoying the astonishing career reboot that Frankenstein had made possible. No film actor, with the possible exception of the great Morgan Freeman, has managed such a stunning late-career turnaround*: practically overnight he went from being an obscure middle-aged character actor to over-the-title top banana, for a time credited at Universal simply as KARLOFF, his surname alone enough to sell tickets; billed in advertisements as "Karloff the Uncanny", hailed as the second coming of the great Lon Chaney himself.

And like many who struggled in their early careers Karloff didn't take fame for granted. He worked hard and tried to demonstrate his range as an actor. And in The Black Room his efforts pay off handsomely.

It's really a treat to watch Karloff at work here. His portrayal of the sociopathic Gregor is utterly convincing -- we grasp quickly that the man is cruel and ruthless, but as the movie goes on his behavior evinces something much darker; that he is, quite simply, a monster. He will literally do anything to get what he wants. Karloff wisely doesn't try to underline this with a lot of theatrical mugging. His Gregor is clearly watching everything around him, sizing up everyone else and constantly searching for an advantage. This is a smart, understated film performance that works because it isn't transparently showy.

The screenplay sometimes works too hard to point up the differences between Gregor and his twin. The soft-spoken, dandified, snuff-taking Anton is even given a paralyzed arm in order to make him appear more ineffectual. But Karloff's body language -- always the most powerful weapon in his actor's arsenal -- is even more important than vocal mannerisms or costume in telling the two apart. Even when Gregor is standing still Karloff imbues him with a lithe, lupine energy, always watching for an attack from an unseen angle; while Anton's manner is flat-footed, trusting, utterly unsuspecting. As a showcase for Karloff's strengths you could hardly do better.

And as a commercial vehicle it would have been a good bet too, mixing three popular genres of the 1930s -- gothic horror, costume drama and royal melodrama -- together in one appealing package.

Karloff is assisted by a clever screenplay that leads us inexorably to Gregor's final comeuppance, and though the final act gets a bit muddled it remains a smart and sharply-focused thriller.

Of course, some of the credit needs to go to director Roy William Neill, something of a master craftsman behind the camera. Neill started his career working in silent pictures, and did a lot of work for Universal in the 1940s, directing most of the studio's Sherlock Holmes pictures as well as the Shock! package mainstay Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. The Black Room is a good example of his ability to make the most of limited time and money, and it's one of the prolific director's best efforts.

The Man With Nine Lives

Synopsis: Dr. Tim Mason (Roger Pryor) is conducting ground-breaking research in cryogenics. In a public demonstration, he lowers the body temperature of a patient until she is in a coma-like state. Five days later he brings her out of it, and after the procedure her chronic pain has diminished considerably.

After the demonstration, Dr. Mason tells his fiancee, nurse Judith Blair (Jo Ann Sayers) that his results are encouraging, but not what he had hoped. He reveals that most of his experiments are derived from the work of a mysterious Dr. Leon Kravaal (Boris Karloff), whose book on the subject of cryogenics hinted that he was in possession of a mysterious process that allowed the body to be completely frozen. Laboratory animals exposed to this process would completely recover from the freezing. Moreover, cancer cells in test animals disappeared after prolonged treatment, because the body's immune system was still working while the cancer cells were suspended. Mason is fascinated by these revelations, and would love to get more of the details of the procedures from Kravaal; but the scientist vanished ten years earlier.

The hospital administration disapproves of all the meddlesome publicity Mason is generating and they force him to take a leave of absence. Seeing an opportunity to track Kravaal down, Mason and Blair drive up north to Kravaal's last known address. This turns out to be a spooky old house on a small island.

The place had been abandoned since the disappearance of Kravaal, the county sheriff, county prosecutor, town doctor and two other townspeople.

Exploring the house, Dr. Mason and Judith discover a passage from the basement that leads to an abandoned laboratory, and beyond that, an icy underground cavern. In this cavern Dr. Kravaal is discovered. Using the techniques he's developed to revive hypothermic patients (i.e., warming them with blankets and pouring hot coffee down their throats) Kravaal eventually comes around. He's astonished to find that he has been in suspended animation for ten years. Then he reveals that in a second chamber, behind the first, there are four bodies.

In a flashback sequence, Kravaal explains that the elderly Jasper Adams had come to him in hopes that frozen therapy might cure his cancer. Adams' nephew became suspicious, and the county prosecutor brought Kravaal in. In the prosecutor's office the town doctor avers that he had previously examined Adams, and it was clear the man's cancer was terminal. Kravaal scoffs at the doctor's hidebound pronouncements, but under duress he agrees to take the men to see Jasper Adams during his treatment.

Kravaal takes them, along with the county sheriff, to the island and the underground cavern. Seeing Adams' frozen body, the doctor declares him dead, and the sheriff places him under arrest. Kravaal uses a beaker of chemicals to render his captors unconscious, but in the process places everyone -- including himself -- in a state of suspended animation.**

After relating this amazing story, Mason and Judith help Kravaal revive the others, all of whom are astonished that ten years have passed and that they have all probably been declared dead.

When Jasper Adams' loud-mouthed nephew destroys the formula used to put them in suspended animation, Kravaal kills him. He then tells the others that he must now reconstruct the formula, and he must use them all as his guinea pigs....

Comments: The Man With Nine Lives arrived in theaters only five years after The Black Room, but seeing them back to back makes the gap seem more like fifty years, or five hundred. While Karloff's career hadn't exactly hit the skids in the interim, there is no question that things had changed. No more single-name-on-the-marquee nonsense, no more "Karloff the Uncanny" hype, no more costume dramas. No more demonstrating his range. No more pretending that he's a man with a thousand faces. For the most part he now had one face, one that audiences would see again and again -- the face of the mad scientist.

At the end of the day he couldn't outrun those bushy eyebrows and that brooding demeanor: sooner or later he was going to be -- gulp!-- typecast. If I had lived in those days, and had to bet on it, I'd wager that Karloff was destined to be typecast as a brains heavy, sending his muscle-bound minions out to kidnap the girl, or rub out the hero, or steal the nuclear secrets.

I would have lost that bet, of course ( I'd be a terrific gambler if I wasn't wrong so much of the time). Nope, Karloff's fate was to be cast again and again as the demented guy with the Erlenmeyer flask in his hand.

To be typecast is not the worst thing in the world, as Peter Falk often said. But it's important to be typecast in the right sort of role, and Karloff made a good living playing what turned out to be a good fit for him.

Nevertheless, tonight's vehicle suffers from a number of fatal flaws, which I previously enumerated here. Seeing it again hasn't improved my opinion of it.

The truth is, Dr. Mason and his bony girlfriend have to carry the movie for a long time until Dr. Kravaal shows up, and it just doesn't work. At first I suspected the screenwriters were hoping that the conspicuously absent Karloff would haunt the first third of the picture the way Gene Tierney did in Laura, or Orson Welles did in The Third Man, but neither of those films had been made yet. So scratch that idea.

Scott Ashlin at 1000 Misspent Hours insists that The Man With Nine Lives is actually a significant improvement over its predecessor, The Man They Could Not Hang. Go ahead and give it a read; Ashlin's a talented writer and I can't find any flaw in his argument. Except, of course, that it's wrong.


_______________________
*Morgan Freeman's stardom came relatively late in his career, but he still wasn't catapulted to fame the way Karloff was. For many years Freeman was a bread-and-butter character actor best known as Easy Reader on the PBS series The Electric Company. After a five year run, he found it hard to be taken seriously as an actor due to his association with the show. It wasn't until he was in his 50s, when he appeared in 1987's Street Smart that he received the first real acclaim of his career. Suddenly the scripts he was being offered improved dramatically, and within two years he was an honest-to-peaches movie star.

**Oops!

Interlude: The Now Explosion

For all we know, the good people at Horror Incorporated may have been planning a knockout Halloween show for the evening of Saturday, October 31, 1970. That would have been cool. But we'll never find out.

The show vanished from the schedule for 13 weeks beginning on October 17, replaced by a high-concept syndicated program called The Now Explosion.

This show was the brainchild of producer Bob Whitney, who imagined a sort of top 40 radio station on your TV. An unseen dj would introduce the latest chart-toppers from the Rolling Stones, CCR, Edwin Starr, The Fifth Dimension, etc, accompanied by images designed to enhance the audio track.

What sort of images? Dancers wearing groovy outfits of various types were popular. Bands were sometimes recorded lip-synching their hits, and on some occasions dancers were photographed outside of the studio. You can see a 30-minute sampling of The Now Explosion's video efforts here. But I should warn you: the segment built around The Fifth Dimension's Up, Up and Away may cause migraine headaches, hypertension, suicidal thoughts or death.


Four decades on the video techniques look fairly laughable -- you could easily do better with your laptop at home today -- but in terms of raw technology this was the best 1970 could offer. But that only partially excuses The Now Explosion's shortcomings. The producers were clearly trying to find a way to mesh the images with the audio, to make the two belong to each other, but they were never able to figure out how. They had little time to experiment, and very little money.

The mammoth video tape machines, state-of-the-art Grass Valley Series 1400 production switcher and 2-inch video tape were all quite expensive, and in spite of its chintzy look The Now Explosion had a financial burn rate that doomed it from the start. The show hung on as long as it could, moving its operation from Atlanta to Fort Lauderdale after its first flight of 13 episodes, and closing up shop at the conclusion of the second.

The Now Explosion's web site lauds the show for being the forerunner to MTV. But in fact, that honor belongs to Michael Nesmith, who essentially invented the modern music video for his late-70s Nickelodean show PopClips. MTV was built directly upon the foundation that PopClips had laid . Show 'em how it's done, Mike:

Perhaps the kindest thing we can say about The Now Explosion is that it didn't outstay its welcome. Horror Incorporated was back on the schedule by January 16.

So let's reconvene in 1971, at the usual place. See you there, gentle reader.

Saturday, October 10, 1970: The Mummy's Tomb (1942) / Behind the Mask (1932)

Synopsis: Retired archeologist Steve Banning (Dick Foran) is regaling his son John (John Hubbard) and John’s fiancée Isobel Evans (Elyse Knox) with the story of his strange expedition to Egypt thirty years earlier: how he and the members of his expedition found the tomb of the mummy Kharis and, breaking the seal, unleashed a horrible curse that brought the mummy back to life. In a series of flashbacks, we are told how various members of the expedition were killed by Kharis, who was being controlled by the high priest Andoheb (George Zucco). In the end the mummy was destroyed and Steve and the surviving members of his party returned home.
John and Isobel find the story so fantastic that it isn’t clear if they completely believe it, but Banning claims every word of it is true.
Meanwhile, in Egypt, an elderly Andoheb is handing off his mummy-protecting duties to young Mehemet Bey (Turhan Bey). He tells the young man that the defilers of Kharis’ tomb still live; they must be tracked down and killed, and their line must be extinguished. Bey immediately makes plans to sail to Massachusetts, where the Banning family lives.
Once in America, Bey takes a job as caretaker in a cemetery, and from the caretaker’s cottage sets his plan in motion. Each night he gives the mummy the potion derived from nine tana leaves, which brings it to life. He orders the creature to kill Steve Banning. It shambles out to the Banning house and does so. The next night Bey orders it to dispense with Babe Hanson, another survivor of the expedition. This too the mummy accomplishes.


But a mummy's work is never done, and we learn that young John Banning is on the schedule for the next night. Surprisingly, the ultra-disciplined Bey hesitates. He finds himself captivated by the beautiful Isobel, and disobeys his orders from Andoheb by sending the mummy not to kill John but to capture Isobel, and bring her to him. What he does not know is that the townspeople are becoming suspicious of him, and that Kharis is close to rebelling against his sacrilege….


Comments: While watching The Mummy's Tomb, I found myself thinking back to the summer of 1999. In those days I lived in Saint Paul's Highland Park neighborhood, just a few blocks from the 2-screen Highland Theater. Walking along Cleveland Avenue one afternoon I saw two magic words spelled out on the theater marquee: THE MUMMY.
"Oh boy!" I blurted out. "The Mummy!"
A woman walking a few paces ahead of me slowed and threw a quizzical glance back in my direction: grown men are not supposed to say such things in public. I lowered my head guiltily, then jaywalked across to the theater and bought a ticket.
The movie I saw that day was, of course, Universal's "reboot" of the Mummy franchise, a "reimagining" that played more as an action-comedy than a horror film: louder, busier, more violent and more expensive than the originals -- not that there's anything wrong with that.
This millennial Mummy reboot was certainly entertaining, informed by the same bubblegum sensibility that made Raiders of the Lost Ark go.
Nevertheless, I prefer Universal's original take, as dull as its later entries sometimes were; as well as the Hammer mummy films that came along a couple of decades later.
Hammer films, it must be said, are an acquired taste. It's important to encounter them at the right time and under the right circumstances, lest the blood-and-boobs formula obscure their gothic underpinnings. I first saw Hammer's Curse of the Mummy's Tomb Blood From the Mummy's Tomb at age fifteen; and seeing it I sensed that a new world was opening up to me.



Not a world of mummies or the supernatural -- that was quite old hat for me. Nope, Valerie Leon had arrived in my life, and she was a different sort than the sugary girl-next-door types who had long inhabited American movies. Leon played a woman who, in spite of having an active sex life, nonetheless still smoldered with unfulfilled sexual longing. It just so happened that when I was fifteen, I was chosen to represent America in the global "unfulfilled sexual longing" competition, so I found her portrayal incredibly compelling; and at the same time I began to realize how prudish American movies were by comparison. We can see ample evidence of that prudishness in any Universal film of the era, but especially in tonight's movie.
After all, each of the Mummy sequels used sexual hunger as a plot device, but it was always expressed obliquely and never experienced by any of the women in the film. In fact the virginal female leads never display any interest in sex at all, beyond the occasional arch of the eyebrows designed to hurry her love interest along to the altar. The sexual longing in these films is entirely assumed by the hapless High Priests of Karnakh, a secret society so incompetent it can't even keep track of one fucking mummy, and staffed by members so repressed that the appearance of a single pretty woman sends the most devout of them straight over the edge.
George Zucco's Andoheb is the first to go bananas in The Mummy's Hand, as he decides to abandon his vows because he likes the cut of Peggy Moran's jib. Similarly, in The Mummy's Ghost, John Carradine's Yousef Bey decides that he'd prefer to wake up each morning next to Ramsey Ames, rather than a sarcophagus. In The Mummy's Curse, Peter Coe's Ilzor actually manages to keep his pants on, but assistant Martin Kosleck can't. In tonight's feature Turhan Bey is made the keeper of the tana leaf jar, but he fares no better: one look at John Banning's fiance Isobel and he becomes a sexually-obsessed wreck, turning Kharis against him when he opts to chuck his part in a 3,500 year-old mission in order to get laid.
This turn of events is foreshadowed early in the movie, when the newly-minted High Priest takes the job of a cemetery caretaker in Mapleton. The retiring caretaker is skeptical: why would a man want to waste his youth among the dead, when there is a whole world of living to be had? But the young man is adamant, insisting that he finds the cemetery peaceful. Like many religious fanatics, Mehemet Bey has drastically narrowed his life experience in order to avoid the temptations of the flesh. But he has outsmarted himself, because avoiding temptation has left him without the strength to resist it when it inevitably appears on his doorstep.
Which leads us to an almost archetypal scene in these movies: the High Priest of Karnakh has betrayed his vows in order to be with a woman, but he forgot to check in with the woman first. He has Kharis retrieve her the same way a black lab retrieves a downed mallard. Isobel wakes up, bound hand and foot, to see a stranger looming over her, delivering the Worst Pick-Up Line Ever*:

It is your destiny to achieve the greatest honor that can come to a woman. You will become the bride of a high priest of Karnakh....for you I am going to forsake the teachings that have been handed down to us for generations without end....the secret that has kept Kharis alive all these years can be ours as well....after I have given you the tana fluid you will be immortal, just as Kharis is immortal.

Aw, what a sweet-talker, this guy.
You'll note that the tana fluid device, which was never that convincing to begin with (exactly nine leaves to bring the mummy to life? What if the leaves are broken, or of different sizes?) is given a new angle: now if any human drinks the tana leaf fluid, they become immortal too. I can see the ad campaign now -- TANA LEAVES: THEY'RE NOT JUST FOR MUMMIES ANYMORE. No word from the High Priests of Karnakh as to how they came by this information, or how mummy-like a human imbibing tana leaf fluid becomes.
I'll let you know when I hear back from the High Priests of Karnakh's Chicago office. In the meantime, enjoy the Castle Films version of THE MUMMY'S TOMB.

BEHIND THE MASK


Synopsis: A Sing Sing inmate named Quinn (Jack Holt) is plotting an escape. His cellmate Henderson (Boris Karloff) advises against it, claiming that powerful friends will spring both of them soon if they are patient. But seeing that Quinn will not be deterred, Henderson tells him how to get in touch with his associate on the outside, a man named Arnold (Claude King). Quinn’s escape is successful and he travels to Arnold’s mansion in the country. Arnold seems afraid to assist Quinn, but is too frightened of his employer, the mysterious drug kingpin Mr. X, to refuse. He employs Quinn as his chauffer, and Quinn becomes enamored of Arnold’s beautiful daughter Julie (Constance Cummings).
Soon enough Henderson is released and makes contact with Dr. August Steiner (Edward Van Sloan), who runs the Eastland Hospital. We learn that Steiner is also an agent of Mr. X , and he tells Henderson that Mr. X arranged for him to be incarcerated so long because he was displeased with him.
Henderson suggests Quinn as the perfect man to deliver the next drug shipment for the organization. But as soon as Steiner sees Quinn he knows the man is an undercover federal agent. Henderson is shocked and angered by this revelation.



But the plan to have Quinn to pick up the shipment via seaplane goes forward. After Quinn delivers the drugs to a ship at sea, Henderson instructs Quinn to take off and then bail out – the boat, he says, will come to his location and pick him up. Quinn, sensing that this is an attempt to dupe him, quickly “rigs a dummy”, attaches it to the parachute and tosses it overboard so that Henderson will think it’s him.
But before long Steiner captures Quinn himself. He plans on disposing of the federal agent in his usual manner – by getting him admitted to his hospital and subjecting him to an unnecessary – and fatal – operation…Comments: Behind the Mask is the sort of movie where crooks start off every speech with phrases like, "Now get this, you mug!" The warmed-over gangster patois doesn't wear particularly well because Behind the Mask doesn't take it seriously, or at least not seriously enough. Without any particular knowledge or interest in the lives of blue-collar criminals, the screenwriters focus on the brains heavy, whose white-collar sensibilities must have seemed more familiar. Thus we have Edward Van Sloan playing Dr. August Steiner, a bearded and bespectacled doctor whose sinister mien is shorthand for Jewishness in an era when such stereotypes were still considered acceptable. This Columbia offering differs from Warner's underworld pictures of the time because of the uncertainty of its approach as well as the zany hardware and tactics the mysterious Mr. X employs. This is a movie so melodramatic even Mr. X's taunting notes to the police come with their own dramatic pauses.


In fact so numerous are the high-tech gadgets (Cyclotrons! Telephones! Wire recorders!) that Behind the Mask might have worked better as a serial. Believe me, it could have used two fistfights and a cliffhanger every fifteen minutes.


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*Having tried this speech out a few times in my youth, I can personally attest that it is indeed the Worst Pick-Up Line Ever.

Saturday, October 3, 1970: Dracula (1931) / She Wolf of London (1946)

Dracula

Synopsis: Renfield (Dwight Frye), a young attorney from London, arrives at a small Carpathian village. His fellow travelers are staying in the village overnight but he insists on continuing on to the castle of a local nobleman, Count Dracula (Bela Lugosi).

The villagers turn pale at the very mention of the name, and beg him not to go. But Renfield is there on business, and insists on completing his journey.

After an unnerving trip to the castle, Renfield finally meets the count, who signs documents to complete his purchase of Carfax Abbey in England. It is to England, Dracula says, that he will go the very next morning.

Later, a ship drifts into an English harbor, all aboard her dead -- save for Renfield, who is now a stark, raving lunatic.

Several crates from the ship are delivered to Carfax Abbey. From one of them emerges Count Dracula, who soon insinuates himself into London society, befriending Dr. Seward, owner of the Seward Asylum where Renfield is confined. The asylum is, we learn, next door to Carfax Abbey. Dracula meets Dr. Seward's daughter, Mina (Helen Chandler); her fiancee Jonathan Harker (David Manners), and their friend Lucy (Frances Dade).

Meanwhile, a string of bizarre murders has caught the interest of Dr. Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan), an unorthodox scientist and student of the occult. Two small puncture wounds, he finds, were on the necks of each victim, including young Lucy.

When Mina relates a dream of a man coming into her bedroom and biting her neck, Seward is surprised to see that Mina has been hiding two small puncture wounds herself. But Van Helsing is not surprised. He insists that a vampire is attempting to make Mina its slave by visiting her over a series of subsequent nights.

Mina can only be protected, he says, by locking her in her room, and sealing the windows with wolfbane and crucifixes, which vampires find repellent.

Meanwhile, Count Dracula pays a visit to the Seward home, and Van Helsing quickly realizes that Dracula himself is the vampire they seek. A battle of wits ensues, with Van Helsing battling Count Dracula for Mina's very soul....

Comments: Dracula was the first movie to be broadcast twice on Horror Incorporated, and tonight it becomes the first to be broadcast three times.

You may remember that Horror Incorporated first aired this movie the night of its premiere on November 8, 1969. We saw it again on August 22. Having it pop up again, for the third time in a single year, makes me wonder if we're getting too much of a good thing.

And it raises a question that I've been asked a few times since I started this project: how do we know for sure what was running on a particular date?

The short answer is: we can't be 100% certain. We're going by the broadcast schedules printed in the Minneapolis Tribune. And those of us who remember the olden days of newspaper TV schedules know that they were occasionally wrong.

But one advantage to having your show in the middle of the night was that it was harder to get pre-empted. Horror Incorporated wasn't about to get bumped by special programming -- for example, the American League playoffs, in which Minnesota was battling against the Baltimore Orioles for the pennant, interrupted a lot of programming on October 3, 1970.*

But Horror Incorporated was able to saunter on, oblivious to the mayhem farther up the program grid. So I'd say that if there was an error in the listing, it would be due to a mistake in the newspaper, not because the show was pre-empted due to an 11-inning ball game, or because the President suddenly got a yen to address the nation from the Oval Office.

Having said that, it's certainly not inconceivable that Dracula ran three times in one year.

Obviously, I'd prefer a back-up source of information -- videotape archives of the show, station memos or other documents referencing the movies on the schedule, etc.

I have been trying to obtain such documents, but let's face it: local, non-hosted late-night creature features were never seen as likely candidates for historic preservation. I'm sure much of what I am looking for was routinely tossed out by the station when it was no longer useful. But I will keep trying.

Anyway, I'm not complaining about seeing Dracula again. If you're going to see any movie three times in a year, it might as well be this one. It holds up surprisingly well on repeat viewing, though I would say that it is best in its first and final thirds, sagging somewhat in the talky second act.

Interestingly, Dr. Van Helsing stands as the perfect counterpoint to Bride of Frankenstein's Dr. Pretorious. Pretorious is an amoral scientist who turns to the occult in order to gain knowledge and abilities that science cannot offer; while Van Helsing is a deeply moral scientist who studies the occult in order to battle its evils. It's a pity the two characters didn't get a chance to face off in a movie of their own. It would have been interesting to see what each would have made of the other's curriculum vitae.

And just because you asked, here is the Castle Films version of Dracula -- pared down to within an inch of its unnatural life.

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* In case you're curious, the heavily-favored Orioles swept the Twins in the best-of-five series, then went on to defeat the Cincinnati Reds four games to one in the World Series. In 1970 there were two divisions per league, so division winners had only one best-of-five series between them and the pennant.

She-Wolf of London

Synopsis: Young Phyllis Allenby (June Lockhart) is preparing for her marriage to attorney Barry Lanfield (Don Porter). Barry is the perfect candidate for marriage: handsome, patient, understanding, and (last but not least) wealthy. But Phyllis is deeply troubled, because a bizarre series of murders has been taking place in the park near the Allenby estate. The method of the killings suggest an animal attack, and Phyllis mutters fearfully about a return of the "Allenby Curse".

Meanwhile, Phyllis' cousin Carol Winthrop (Jan Wiley) is caught by her mother, Martha Winthrop (Sara Haden) trying to send a letter to a boyfriend across town. Martha warns Carol that she can never have anything to do with young Dwight Severn (Martin Kosleck), reminding her that Dwight is penniless. She reveals something that no one else seems to know -- that neither she nor Carol is related by blood to Phyllis Allenby. Martha has been the family housekeeper for decades and it is now taken on faith that she and Carol are members of the family.

Now that Phyllis is the sole remaining heir of the Allenby estate, Martha and Carol are in a precarious position, at risk of losing everything -- if Phyllis marries. But if Carol were to marry Lanfield instead, matters would improve considerably for both Carol and Martha.

Unorthodox Detective Latham of Scotland Yard is convinced that the park murders are the work of a werewolf, a theory rejected by hidebound Inspector Pierce (Dennis Hoey). In fact, the only person who seems to buy into the werewolf theory is Phyllis herself, who explains to Aunt Martha that the Allenby Curse dooms members of her family to turn into ravenous wolves, an affliction for which there is no cure.

Aunt Martha tries to convince Phyllis that it's all in her head, but Phyllis knows that each morning her slippers are caked with mud, her dress sodden and torn, and her hands covered with blood.

Fearful of the creature that she has become, she breaks off her engagement with Barry. But Barry refuses to believe in the curse, or in Phyllis' guilt, and he is determined to unmask the real she-wolf of London....

Comments: In my previous write-up of She-Wolf of London I noted that the film was an amalgamation of two popular suspense pictures of the early 1940s: Cat People and Gaslight. On a second viewing, She-Wolf of London might best be described as Cat People's premise melded with Gaslight's ending. As in Cat People, Phyllis is worried about her impending marriage to Barry because she is convinced she turns into a vicious animal, as predicted by her family's curse. But, like Gaslight, it turns out that this is all a set-up, perpetrated by her closest confidante.

This isn't a bad idea, actually, but She-Wolf of London falls apart on execution, for three critical reasons.

The first, and most egregious, is the that the screenplay cheats the audience. When you promise a she-wolf (in the title, no less) you'd damn well better come up with a she-wolf, either literally (woman turns into ravenous wolf) or figuratively (woman is predatory in her behavior, demeanor or appetites).

I asked my friend Shakira to throw a video together demonstrating this second definition of she-wolfery, and she kindly agreed:

Second, the Allenby curse is repeatedly invoked, and evidence is given for us to believe it (the crazed way dogs react to Phyllis, for example); but once Aunt Martha is identified as the killer, everyone agrees that the Allenby curse was just a lot of superstitious nonsense. Some of Phyllis' evidence for the curse is explained away by Martha's actions (the muddy boots and blood-stained hands), but everything else is conveniently forgotten.

The third problem that undercuts She-Wolf of London is its dreadful cheapness. The C-list cast is clearly racing through the shooting schedule, and there is no time to build atmosphere, suspense, or even convincing English accents. A very young June Lockhart has neither the screen presence nor the acting chops to carry the movie effectively, and she isn't aided by the colorless studio contract players surrounding her. Martin Kosleck, who is always interesting to watch, has little more than a cameo here.

Castle Films, it should be noted, apparently didn't think She-Wolf of London warranted an 8-minute version. I can't say I'm surprised.

Saturday, September 26, 1970: The Wolf Man (1941) / House of Dracula (1945)

The Wolf Man

Synopsis: Lawrence Talbot returns to the family estate after a self-imposed exile of nearly two decades. He is welcomed back by his father, Sir John Talbot (Claude Rains), and talk quickly turns to Larry's elder brother, who was recently killed in a hunting accident. Now that he is the eldest, Lawrence is heir to the estate, as well as heir to his father's limited capacity for affection.

Lawrence has spent a good deal of time in California, and it shows: by the standards of his home town he is distressingly informal and decidedly frivolous, taking more interest in local shopgirl Gwen Conliffe (Evelyn Ankers) than in the more serious matters surrounding the family estate. Nevertheless Sir John is happy about the prodigal son's return, believing that Lawrence (or "Larry", as he has taken to calling himself) has spent enough time in the New World to benefit the stodgy old ways of Talbot Castle. Larry is certainly good with tools and machines; it's when he is working with modern contrivances that he seems happiest and most self-assured.

In an attempt to get on Gwen's good side, Larry purchases an unusual item from her family's shop: an ornate cane with a silver wolf's head. The wolf, we learn, is a potent and fearful symbol of the supernatural in these parts, as is the pentacle, which is also etched on the handle of the cane.

It turns out that Gwen is engaged to Frank Andrews, a decent fellow; nevertheless, Gwen accompanies Larry to a Gypsy camp, where they hope to have their fortunes told. At the last minute, Gwen invites her friend Jenny (Fay Helm) to join them.

Alas, poor Jenny! She really ought to have known better. As Gwen and Lawrence walk together under the light of the full Moon, Jenny has her fortune read by Bela (Bela Lugosi). What the fortune-teller sees in Jenny's future alarms him, and he urges Jenny to go home -- immediately. Terrified, Jenny runs away into the woods.

Almost immediately, Jenny is set upon by some sort of animal. Larry, hearing her screams, rushes to her aid, and attacks the creature with his cane. He manages to kill it, but not before it mauls his chest. Larry staggers away, collapsing only a few yards from Jenny's body.

Larry is taken home. The next morning he learns several disturbing facts: Jenny is dead, her throat ripped out. While a wolf clearly attacked her, no wolf carcass was found in the area; instead, the body of Bela the fortune-teller was found nearby, his head smashed in, presumably by Larry's cane. Moreover, Larry's chest shows no animal bites whatsoever.

Larry is at a loss to understand what happened, but Sir John offers a rational explanation: Jenny was indeed attacked by a wolf. Larry and Bela ran to her aid at the same time, and in the confusion Larry killed Bela, thinking that he was attacking the wolf. But Larry is unconvinced: how could anyone mistake a man for a wolf, even in the dark? How could wounds on his chest be his imagination? And why wasn't Bela wearing his shoes?

That night, Larry Talbot undergoes a terrible transformation: he becomes a werewolf beneath the full Moon, and murders a gravedigger. The next morning, Larry confesses everything, but no one believes him.

No one, that is, except the Gypsy woman Maleva, whose own son suffered from the same curse....

Comments: Aside from introducing one of the great characters of the Universal horror pantheon, The Wolf Man offers something extra to devoted viewers of Horror Incorporated. The movie is simply loaded with actors we've seen again and again on the show. In addition to the ubiquitous Lon Chaney Jr, we also have Claude Rains (The Invisible Man), Evelyn Ankers (The Frozen Ghost), Ralph Bellamy (The Man Who Lived Twice), Bela Lugosi (Dracula) , Patric Knowles (The Strange Case of Dr. RX) and Fay Helm (Night Monster).

Sometimes movies that are lauded as classics prove disappointing to the modern viewer, but not The Wolf Man. It is, quite simply, a ripping good story. Much of its power comes from an insistence that modern logic offer no protection against ancient fears.

From the very beginning Sir John Talbot is depicted as a progressive fellow, insisting that Lawrence's time in America can only benefit the locals. Throughout the movie, Sir John's confidence in modernity and rationality never wavers. Yet for all his soothing speeches, he is absolutely powerless to prevent the mayhem that is to come. In the end this rational man loses his own child to the same irrational force that took Maleva's. The only difference is that Maleva understands the ancient forces at work, and can at least make peace with them.

Curt Siodmak's brisk screenplay wisely makes Larry a proxy for the viewer: he has been away so long that he is essentially a stranger in his home town (though, if he grew up in the area, it's unlikely that he would be so ignorant of the werewolf lore everyone else seems to know by heart). Unlike the frosty Dr. Wilfred Glendon in Werewolf of London, Larry is depicted as a regular guy, someone who'd rather be buying a pretty girl a soda than peering through a microscope.

The screenplay rarely falters in making Larry a decent, likable fellow, but Siodmak arranges an unfortunate meet-cute between Larry and Gwen. Larry is setting up his father's telescope at Talbot Castle and, peering into the eyepiece, just happens (cough, cough) to see Gwen through her bedroom window; smitten, he goes to her shop and asks for the earrings he knows are on her nightstand. This was probably considered fun and light-hearted stuff in 1941 (hey, he wouldn't be spying on you with a telescope if he didn't like you), but today it makes Larry seem rather unsavory.

Of course, this might be a hint of what's to come, if you are willing to regard the werewolf as Larry's repressed id running amok; but the metaphor of hairy-wolfman-as-the-animal-we-carry-inside-us seems too shopworn and dreary to go into. So let's sidestep the issue and assume the telescope scene was meant to be innocent fun -- in an era when any women who said otherwise would be accused of being no fun at all.

This was probably Lon Chaney Jr's best performance, and the role seems to have been written with him in mind: Larry is good-natured, gentle in most circumstances, but capable of great anger when he feel he's been wronged. This plays greatly to Chaney's strengths as a soft-spoken but physically imposing actor. Similarly, Evelyn Ankers is not entirely forgettable here, as close to an acting triumph as she is likely to get.

Patric Knowles excelled at playing stuffed shirts named Frank, and he is perfectly serviceable here; but what Ralph Bellamy is doing as the local prosecutor, it isn't easy to say.

Maria Ouspenskaya is brilliant in her first film appearance as Maleva. She brings a somber dignity to her character, as she would later in the less-dignified Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man.

I've got a little treat for you -- the 8-minute Castle Films version of The Wolf Man. In the pre-home video days, Castle Films were the only way you could watch your favorite movies again, and they were cleverly boiled down to a single 8- or 16-mm reel. In many ways they were small masterpieces in their own right, cramming every plot point into an impossibly small container:

House of Dracula

Synopsis: Patients from all over the world seek out the brilliant Dr. Edelmann (Onslow Stevens), a physician with a keen mind and a big heart. He has a practice that he runs out of his castle in Vasaria, and those who have lost hope in conventional medicine can turn to him in their hour of need.
Late one night Edelmann is dozing in an easy chair when a man in top hat and tails shows up in his living room and wakes him. The stranger introduces himself as Baron Latos, but it's obvious right away that he's really Count Dracula (John Carradine). He wants Dr. Edelmann to help find a cure for his vampirism.

By cure, Dracula presumably isn't looking for the sunlight-and-wooden-stake cure. We're talking a medical cure, something that will make him mortal again.

Since Dracula's already dead, I would rate his chances for a full recovery as vanishingly slim, but Edelmann is made of sterner stuff and agrees to give it a try.

Meanwhile, an agitated man is trying to get in to see Dr. Edelmann. It's our old friend Lawrence Talbot (Lon Chaney, Jr). and after badgering the receptionist for a while, he rushes out of the clinic, jabbering about the full Moon that will soon rise.

In his laboratory, Edelmann is examining the Count's blood cells under a microscope, when he gets a phone call from Vasaria's chief of police (Lionel Atwill). A distraught man has demanded to be incarcerated. He's clearly a nutter, so would Edelmann come down and have a look at him?

Edelmann does so, and comes face to face with Lawrence Talbot, who claims he turns into a werewolf when the Moon is full.

At just about that moment, the full Moon comes into view and Talbot changes into a wolf man -- before his very eyes. He tells the Chief to keep the beast imprisoned until morning -- then he will examine Talbot.

When Dracula comes back Edelmann tells him that vampirism is caused by a blood parasite, and that a series of blood transfusions might do the trick. It turns out that Talbot's problem also has a scientific basis. Talbot turns into a werewolf, we are told, because he believes he will. This belief, combined with certain irregularities in Talbot's skull that put pressure on key points in the brain, trigger his lycanthropic proclivities.

The condition can be cured, Edelmann says, but it will take time. This is too much for the excitable Talbot, who races out of the castle and throws himself off a nearby cliff into the ocean.

Edelmann, believing Talbot may have been swept into a cave in the cliffside, lowers himself with a rope down the cliff face. He finds that Talbot -- now a wolf man -- has indeed found his way into a cave. Moreover, there's someone else there -- Frankenstein's monster, in suspended animation....

Comments: I talked about House of Dracula here, when it was first broadcast on Horror Incorporated; and in spite of my best efforts I couldn't muster a lot of enthusiasm while watching it again.

It's difficult today to imagine movies like House of Dracula being scary for audiences, even when they were running in theaters. Finding modern analogues for these movies isn't exact, but let's agree that Alien was creepy and quite scary, while Alien V. Predator was silly and derivative. Would it follow, then, that Alien is to Dracula as Alien Vs. Predator is to House of Dracula? It is tempting to think so. But to be sure I decided to go back and see what the self-appointed guardians of moral cleanliness thought about this movie. Take it away, Catholic Legion of Decency:

House of Dracula -- Murky monster tale of an idealistic doctor (Onslow Stevens) who cures the Wolfman (Lon Chaney, Jr.) after killing the prowling Dracula (John Carradine), then discovers he's been contaminated by the vampire's blood and becomes one himself until reviving the Frankenstein monster (Glenn Strange) for a fiery finale. Directed by Erle C. Kenton, the feverish plot is as unconvincing as the monsters, though the spooky visuals and eerie atmosphere offer some scary moments. Stylized violence, menacing situations and hokey moralizing. (A-II)

Now when the Legion of Decency accuses you of "hokey moralizing", you know you're in trouble.

The A-II rating, by the way, meant that it was only partially objectionable, and was acceptable fare for adults and adolescents. It was actually rare for the Legion to condemn a film outright; the studios were careful not to offend the Catholic lobby, and the Catholic censors was careful not to veer too far out from popular taste. The review suggests that the monster rallies of the mid-1940s were neither offensive nor particularly frightening.

And really, who is going to be scared of a horse-faced ham like John Carradine?

But the real question we should be asking is: Does House of Dracula entertain? Well, sure. It is a buck-toothed, lovable little movie. Perhaps I am less forgiving of it because its sudden lurch into pseudo-science was jarring (in the same way George Lucas' decision to come up with "mitochondria" as a scientific explanation for The Force was jarring). And after all, not counting a few Abbot and Costello appearances, this was the last roundup for the icons of Universal Horror. Too bad they couldn't go out with a bit more dignity.