This is Week One (Oct. 1 - 7) of KARLOFF MONTH! Click on the links to visit WEEK TWO or WEEK THREE or WEEK FOUR.
October 7
The Raven
Universal, 1935
Directed by Louis Friedlander
Starring Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Irene Ware, Samuel S. Hinds
Following the success of Frankenstein in late 1931, it appeared that Karloff's ship had come in. Universal prominently featured him in its publicity, The Old Dark House and The Mummy did great box office, MGM borrowed him for Mask of Fu Manchu... the actor felt he was within his rights to ask for more money. He was, but Universal was also within its rights to say "NO!" Boris, who would be a champion of better equity for actors (and one of the founders of the Screen Actor's Guild), walked. All the way to England, in fact; he returned home for the first time in years to star in a Mummy-inspired film, The Ghoul, for Gaumont. He returned home and picked up work for RKO and United Artists before he was able to reach a fairer deal with Universal, and work began on The Black Cat (1934) with Bela Lugosi.
Lugosi had thought he'd achieved super-stardom with Dracula, but he discovered that screen immortality doesn't pay the rent (or even the narcotics bill). The negative on that film was scarcely developed before he found himself toiling in cheap Mascot serials, and he also hadn't worked at Universal in two years when he returned for The Black Cat. By all reports, the two great horror stars respected each other and, while certainly not friends, cohabitated nicely. The movie, although in some ways a major casualty of the newly-empowered Hays Office's censors, is a classic of its kind, and led to a follow-up, The Raven, in 1935. Although often dismissed as poor Poe, it's so darn wacky that here at Balcony Central we love it.
Lugosi is the star of the show in this one (Karloff doesn't even appear until the film is one-quarter through), playing mad Dr. Vollin, who's obsessed with Poe and with Judge Thatcher's daughter. He scars the face of a cheap hood named Bateman (Karloff) to entice him to assist in various nefarious goings-on, not least of all kidnapping the girl and strapping her father to a giant blade on a pendulum in a pit.
The whole thing is over in 61 min., so there isn't much time for fancy camera angles or long-winded exposition, although an interpretive dance set to Poe's poem "The Raven" is thrown in there for you culture-lovers. Lugosi goes from "romantic leading man" to "cackling nut job" in the space of seconds, and Boris has little to do, but does it well (looking around to make the part interesting, he tossed out the famous Frankenstein Monster growl, which is always a delight).
Although for most of his career "Poor Bela" would struggle in movies that were scarcely good enough to play the bottom-half of a double bill at the worst picture show in your neighborhood, post-death he found a cult following that has grown through the years, not least of all because of Tim Burton's loving homage, Ed Wood. Consequently, when Universal Home Video released a DVD collection of four Karloff/Lugosi films a couple of years ago, they called the darn thing The Bela Lugosi Collection! It's a funny world.
October 6
Die, Monster, Die!
American International Pictures, 1965
Directed by Daniel Haller
Starring Boris Karloff, Nick Adams, Fred Jackson, and Suzan Farmer
Despite the respite with Monogram, Karloff's stint on the A-list lasted through RKO's Danny Kaye vehicle,The Secret Life of Walter Mitty in 1947. After that, with horror out of vogue in Hollywood, Boris concentrated more on Broadway, achieving considerable success in Peter Pan and The Lark. His occasional films were, as a rule, low-budget bottom-of-the-bill types, although not the depths to which his one-time rival Bela Lugosi had descended. With the surprising success of Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein in 1948, however, Karloff (who wasn't in that film) was brought back by Universal-International for a pair of sequels starring the comics, plus a few gothic chillers. The rest of the 1950s saw Karloff appearing mainly in a variety of low-budget American and British films for independent producers.
After a five-year absence from the screen, and having seen his horror throne usurped by Vincent Price, Karloff returned to the spook show business courtesy of a new contract with drive-in movie specialists American International Pictures. The teaming of Price and Peter Lorre had proven so popular with Poe's Tales of Terror that Karloff was added and a terror triangle was formed for Roger Corman's The Raven in 1963, with Basil Rathbone thrown in for good measure with Comedy of Terrors (1963, directed by Jacque Tourneur, although many people assume it's Corman's picture). Both were horror spoofs, but the remainder of Boris' AIP career would be straight chillers (save for cameo roles in some of the Beach Party pictures).
Having mined Edgar Allan Poe's vein pretty well, AIP turned to H.P. Lovecraft in 1965, and assigned Karloff to play Nahum Witley, patriarch of a cursed family, in Die, Monster, Die! (adapted from Lovecraft's The Colour out of Space). American TV star Nick Adams is the young hero, who arrives in the town of Arkham looking for his college sweetheart (Suzan Farmer) and finds that she lives with her cranky, deranged scientist father, scarred invalid mother, a butler who appears to be twice Karloff's age, and a greenhouse full of monsters. Not much in the film works, mainly because director Daniel Haller is no Roger Corman and the romantic leads are dull; furthermore, Adams' New York accent is delivered with so little passion that every line of dialog seems to indicate his extreme distaste for the project. Karloff keeps things moving as best he can considering he's in a wheelchair for nearly the entire running time of the film; in the end, he turns into a monster (whose makeup seems to consist of Reynolds Wrap) but that's obviously a stuntman. The plot of the film seems to have been lifted more from Corman's The Haunted Palace than from H.P. Lovecraft, which makes perfect sense if you know that The Haunted Palace was based, not on Poe, but on a Lovecraft tale! In any case, Die, Monster, Die! was not the hit AIP hoped for, and after one more picture with the studio (Ghost in the Invisible Bikini), Karloff's AIP career was over.
October 5
Mr. Wong, Detective
Monogram, 1938
Directed by William Nigh
Starring Boris Karloff, Grant Withers, and Evelyn Brent
Watching this film, released 7 years after Frankenstein, one is apt to shake one's head and say, "Boris, what th' hell HAPPENED?!?"
The 1930s had been a fruitful decade for Karloff, personally and professionally, and he appeared in one classic horror film after another: his resume following his first stint as Mary Shelley's monster included The Old Dark House, Mask of Fu Manchu, The Mummy, The Black Cat, Bride of Frankenstein, The Black Room, The Raven, and a quartet of admittedly minor but still quite satisfying near-classics, The Ghoul, The Invisible Ray, The Walking Dead, and The Man who Lived Again. All within five years, and this list does not include many other interesting features graced by his presence during that period. By 1936, however, Universal had decided to forego horror films, lucrative though they may be: they just weren't worth the bad press and besides, England had all but banned them outright. Boris picked up work with Warners and Fox and made a trip home to England for a film, but when Poverty Row came calling in the person of Monogram Pictures, Karloff listened to their offer. It seems that they were intent on competing with the Charlie Chan and Mr. Moto films over at Fox, and had optioned the rights to Hugh Wiley's Mr. Wong mystery stories, then running in Collier's magazine. Karloff had played Asians from time to time in his career (notably in MGM's Mask of Fu Manchu) and after all, it was steady work... so he took it, and a six-picture deal was struck.
Mr. Wong, Detective was the first of the bunch, and it's deadly dull. Chemical manufacturer John Hamilton seeks Wong's help because he's been receiving threatening messages, and sure enough, he's found dead the next day. Other deaths follow, and the cast does its best to look interested long enough for Mr. Wong to figure out what, who, and how. Lucien Prival, so hilariously unsatisfactory as the would-be Emperor of the World in the serial Darkest Africa two years earlier, is equally ineffective here as a gangster.
The movie makes little sense, and even as these types of pictures go, it's a bad one, with imponderable clues and inadvertent laughs (Karloff picks up a tiny shard of glass from the floor and says, "Very brittle glass. Must've been made by a Bavarian"). Later, he tells a suspect, "Now you have, no doubt, experimented as we all have with vibrations of sound." Boris doesn't exactly sleepwalk through the role, but neither does he distinguish himself. After this, though, he was back at Universal for a little something called Son of Frankenstein, which led to a nice multi-picture deal with Columbia for a series of worthwhile "mad scientist" pictures, and then Karloff could drive off of Poverty Row. In a limo. Monogram gave him a going-away present, though: after five interminable Mr. Wong pictures, the studio decided the last film on his contract should be a horror picture. Keye Luke was handed the lead in the last of the Mr. Wong series, and Boris was saddled with The Ape, the stupidest and worst movie he'd ever make. And that's probably our cue to remind you that In The Balcony is the official sponsor of Monogram Week 2008, coming in February!
October 4
Frankenstein
Universal, 1931
Directed by James Whale
Starring Colin Clive, Mae Clarke, John Boles
and Boris Karloff as the Monster
Following the impressive success of Dracula in early 1931, Universal wanted an immediate gothic followup, and rather than negotiate with the Bram Stoker estate, made a quick deal for an unsuccessful stage version of Mary Shelley's immortal tale of "The Modern Prometheus", Frankenstein. Bela Lugosi was supposed to star and Robert Florey was supposed to direct, but -- well, something happened. Did Lugosi think he was going to play the romantic lead, the doctor, and balk at playing the Monster? That's a possibility. It seems just as likely, though, that once James Whale was handed the director's chair, Lugosi was out regardless of his feelings about the project. In any case, Florey and Bela moved over to Murders in the Rue Morgue and the Frankenstein project became Whale's baby.
The story goes that Karloff was on the Universal lot filming Graft with Regis Toomey, a crime melodrama, when he was spotted by fellow Englishman Whale, who asked him to screen test as the Frankenstein Monster. Boris, who'd been knocking around Hollywood for over a decade and was now 43 years old, was busy in these early talkie days (his filmography indicates more than a dozen films besides Frankenstein released in 1931) but not too busy to try out for a key role with an important director. Makeup man Jack Pierce liked Karloff's face very much, and together they created a grotesque makeup unequaled since the heyday of Lon Chaney. 
Despite the ignomy of being billed as "?" in the opening credits, Karloff's name was soon on the lips of many terrified filmgoers. Today, it's easy to see the film as just a monster movie, albeit a good one. Aside from the hardcore fans, most casual movie buffs probably don't screen it very often, thinking they know it by heart. Well, watch it again. There isn't a bad scene in the picture, and there's a lot of subtext to be found. Henry (Colin Clive) makes it quite clear that he's not interested in bringing a corpse back to life: he wants to CREATE a man himself, which is why he stitches one together piece by piece. Listen to his screams during the "birth" of the Monster, and observe him in the next scene with his feet up, calmy enjoying a cigaret, seemingly post-coital. Whale had definite ideas he wanted put on the screen, and they were profane and blasphemous (which would be even more obvious in the sequel). And is Henry pleased with his "child"! "No blood, no decay, -- just a few stitches!" he says proudly of this mockery of humanity. He doesn't think much of humans anyway; "What is a brain? Only a piece of dead tissue." He doesn't think much of death, either, in one of the first scenes in the picture hitting a statue of the Grim Reaper square in the mug with a shovelful of dirt.
This is a great movie, with a soulful, powerful performance by Boris Karloff. All the years of toiling in productions large and small had paid off at last, and the former William Henry Pratt had achieved screen immortality. He would be a very busy star for the remaining four decades of his life.
Frankenstein has been released on DVD by Universal several times, including a Legacy Collection that gathers the best of the sequels and a 75th Anniversary Edition with bonus features. Heck, they're all highly recommended.
October 3
Isle of the Dead
RKO Radio Pictures, 1945
Directed by Mark Robson, Produced by Val Lewton
Starring Boris Karloff, Ellen Drew, Marc Cramer
Karloff's stint on stage in Arsenic and Old Lace was the must lucrative acting job he'd ever have; not only was he the star, but he was also a substantial financial backer of one of the biggest hits in Broadway history. Plus, his return to Hollywood in 1944 netted him a big salary increase at his old stalking grounds, Universal, where a decade earlier he'd walked rather than play for the peanuts he felt the studio was offering. The best Universal could do at the time, though, was a Phantom of the Opera wannabe called The Climax and another installment in the long-running Frankenstein series, this time with Karloff as the creator, not the createe (House of Frankenstein).
As the year turned to 1945, producer Val Lewton at RKO Radio Pictures, whose B unit had generated critical acclaim and beaucoup box office with such chillers as The Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie, brought Boris in for what would turn out to be a trio of well-mounted gothic ghastlies. The Bodysnatcher (1945) is a genuine horror classic, and Bedlam (1946) has one of Karloff's best performances, but the film in between, Isle of the Dead, is usually dismissed as "lackluster" at best and "a bore" at worst. Variety split the difference, calling it "a slow conversation piece." Here In The Balcony, we believe that the last 15 minutes constitute arguably the most terrifying sequence of any B-horror of the 1940s, but that audiences are usually not awake by that point.
Set in 1912, Isle of the Dead offers Karloff as a cruel Greek general during the Balkan War; he and his friend, an American war reporter, become trapped on a small island when it is suddenly quarantined by the plague. As members of the host household (including Jason Robards, Sr. and Alan Napier) take ill and die, one after the other, Karloff becomes convinced that a young woman staying there is a Vorvolaka, a ghoulish creature that feeds on the life energy of 
others. While all that is going on, though, what turns out to be the main story is that one of the women is convinced she's going to be buried alive, and as we all know, when somebody is terrified of being buried alive, that person is going to end up clawing the inside of a coffin lid with her fingernails.
As mentioned, the picture is slow going up through about the 55 min. mark, but once Katherine Emery ends up in that coffin, you're going to find yourself with some seriously sweaty palms. I literally jumped out of my seat at least twice in the last reel of this film, and was just sorry that I had to put up with so slow a buildup to get there. This is a different kind of villain for Karloff, and he plays it well, but the film doesn't provide enough meat on its bones to keep you satisfied until that deliciously macabre dessert.
Isle of the Dead is available as part of a two-fer Warners DVD with the much better Bedlam, one of this reporter's favorite Karloff pictures (I'm sure we'll get to it this month) for $19.98, or you can buy the 9-movie Val Lewton boxed set for $59.98.
October 2
The Black Castle
Universal-International Pictures, 1952
Directed by Nathan Juran
Starring Richard Greene, Boris Karloff, Stephen McNally, Paula Corday, and Lon Chaney, Jr.
Today, we thought it would be fun to screen a Karloff picture we hadn’t seen before. Following a long, successful stint on Broadway as Captain Hook in a revival of Peter Pan, Boris returned to Hollywood after two years’ absence to star in a couple of gothic horrors for his old studio, Universal, both of them (The Strange Door and The Black Castle) in supporting but key roles. Neither film has much reputation, but the latter at least is quite watchable, and much improved through Karloff’s presence.
Richard Greene (star of British TV’s The Adventures of Robin Hood) is investigating the mysterious disappearance of two of his friends. The trail takes him to the Black Forest castle of Count von Bruno (a nasty-tempered oily villain if we’ve ever seen one) and eventually to the Count’s torture chamber. Karloff is the Court Doctor, who doesn’t approve of the Count but doesn’t openly buck him, either. The lovely Paula Corday is the Countess, who falls in love with Richard Greene, and we don’t blame her. Chaney is, not for the last time in his career, a hulking, brutish manservant. He looks 20 years older than he did four years earlier in Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein; I’d like to think that, 
trying to nail down an Oscar, he purposefully beefed himself up for the role, but somehow I think it more likely that he had assigned himself to a personal fitness trainer named Jack Daniels.
Karloff has little to do in the first half of the film except look menacing; the second half, in which he appears to want to aid the young lovers, has much more footage of him and benefits as a result. The film itself is handsomely mounted, with those great gothic Universal sets (including the Cathedral of Notre Dame) and a music score lifted from The Wolf Man and Son of Frankenstein. The whole project is not unlike the Roger Corman Poe films of a decade later, right down to the “premature burial” angle. And how can you not like a movie in which one of the main characters ends up in a pit of alligators conveniently located at the bottom of a staircase? ("Your ancestors," Greene tells the Count while looking around the castle, "had some quaint ideas of architecture.") After this, producer William Alland and director Nathan Juran would go on to other, more lucrative films for Universal, including The Deadly Mantis. Boris isn’t in that, thankfully.
The Black Castle is available as part of Universal’s Boris Karloff: Franchise Collection ($29.98) along with The Strange Door and three other films. The film and the set are both recommended.
October 1
The Lost Patrol
RKO Radio Pictures, 1932
Directed by John Ford
Starring Victor McLaglen, Boris Karloff, Wallace Ford, and Reginald Denny
As mentioned, Boris didn't get the chance to work with too many top-notch directors. Here's an exception, his only film with the great John Ford, who would go on to win multiple Oscars. Boris is a soldier in the British Army; his platoon is lost in Mesopotamia in 1917, and holed up in a small fort at an oasis. They’re surrounded by snipers, cut off from reinforcements, and being picked off one by one. Karloff, a religious zealot, is soon overcome by mania and has to be restrained, but bonds can’t hold him.
The film is memorable on a number of counts; it’s all-male cast is excellent, led by McLaglen, who is unsure of what to do but committed to rescuing his men (McLaglen would himself win an Oscar a year later, for Ford’s The Informer). There’s a simultaneous sense of doom and hopefulness amongst the men, but the enemy (unseen until the final reel) eventually drive them all over the edge – or under the sand. Karloff? He’s never been as over-the-top as you’ll find him here, and his performance is controversial when fans
discuss this one. Is he delivering the goods, or chewing the sun-baked scenery? The first time I saw this picture, I thought he was hamming it up something fierce. A rewatching led me to a different conclusion, as his performance seems to be a realistic take on what religious mania would look like, considering it was the days of Aimee Semple McPherson. Certainly Ford must’ve elicited, fully or partially, the hysteria reflected by Karloff’s character.
That aside, it’s a terrific action/adventure picture that correctly shows the main result of war: dead young men. “Pity. Decent boy, in a way,” is the eulogy for the platoon’s slain captain, who falls in battle in the film’s opening shot. Later, it’s rightly pointed out, “It doesn’t make much difference, where you bury a man.”
The Lost Patrol is available on DVD from Warners as part of a five-film John Ford Collection ($59.98). The print and transfer are very good, but there are no extras on the disc. Highly recommended.