This is WEEK THREE of BORIS KARLOFF MONTH. Click here to read WEEK ONE and here to read WEEK TWO and here to read WEEK FOUR!

October 21

Bedlam
RKO Radio Pictures, 1946
Produced by Val Lewton, Directed by Mark Robson

Starring Boris Karloff, Anna Lee, Richard Fraser, and Billy House

Although producer Val Lewton’s first two horror films for RKO, The Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie, had been sizable hits for the studio, box office receipts fell for the following offerings, not helped by Lewton’s insistence that there be neither a curse nor a cat person in Curse of the Cat People, a dearth of leopard men in The Leopard Man, no deceased spirits in The Ghost Ship, etc. The series therefore needed a little goose, and got it when The Body Snatcher not only featured a genuine body snatcher, but boasted Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, resulting in the highest grossing film of the series, according to our pal over at the Greenbriar Picture Shows. What a disappointment, then, when the follow-up, Isle of the Dead (covered on October 3), barely broke even, and the next one, Bedlam, arguably the best of the nine Lewton-produced horrors, was the only one to lose money, resulting in a cancellation of the series. It’s also one of my favorite films, and I think Karloff’s greatest screen performance (other than his first two stints as the Frankenstein monster).

“He’s a stench in the nostrils, a sewer of ugliness, and a gutter brimming with slop,” says Mistress Nell Bowen of Master Sims, chief warden of St. Mary’s of Bethlehem Asylum, the infamous London mental institution commonly known as Bedlam. She crosses Karloff once too often, though, and he persuades her guardian to have her declared insane and committed to Bedlam for “treatment.”

Boris is as despicable here as he would ever get in a movie, although he’s as quick-witted and charming as he is ruthless and cruel. Lewton’s insistence on artistry and the horror trappings into which he was forced meshed well, not always the case with his films; the story is suggested by Hogarth’s engraving The Rake’s Progress, which isn’t what you’d normally expect a popular horror film to use for inspiration. I have been a champion of this film for a number of years, despite Richard Fraser's character of a romantic-love-interest-Quaker, which mars an otherwise great B-movie. Bedlam hasn’t always been in much favor among horror fans or Lewton buffs, but it’s a prime showcase for Karloff’s skill and talent and one of his greatest roles. You can find it paired with Isle of the Dead on a Warner Bros. DVD, and included in the big Lewton boxed set.

October 20

The Fear Chamber
Azteca Films/Columbia Pictures, 1972
Directed by Jack Hill & Juan Ibáñez

Starring Boris Karloff, Julissa, Carlos East, and Isela Vega

It was never our intention to make this 31-day celebration of the career of Boris Karloff into a "Best of" festival; the man was in movies almost non-stop for half a century, and he made some bad professional decisions from time to time. And he saved some of his worst films for last.

It seems that Mexican producer Luis Vergara obtained financing from Columbia Pictures (looking for some sort of a tax dodge, no doubt) that enabled him to film four Karloff movies in Mexico in 1968. Unfortunately, Boris' health prevented that, so his scenes were shot in Santa Monica using a combined American/Mexican crew (although nobody got along much). Producer Jack Hill obtained the footage after Karloff's death in February 1969, and added and manipulated scenes to make the films... well, if not quite admirable pieces of cinematic achievement, at least reasonably coherent and releaseable. The results showed up in 1971: House of Evil, The Incredible Invasion, The Snake People, and today's film in our festival, The Fear Chamber.

Karloff is a scientist whose research team has discovered a rock monster living inside a volcano; in their lab -- in an effort to learn from it -- they feed it the only thing it digests: human fear. Specifically, they bring hookers and strippers to a special haunted house-type "fear chamber" where they terrify them into releasing a fear hormone that the rock thing loves. Eventually, though, its hunger grows and it begins manipulating its human hosts into killing the girls.

Boris sometimes interacts with a Spanish-speaking cast (he speaks English) and other times talks to unseen people off-camera ("This is the proudest moment of my career, and all I can do is talk on the telephone!" he says woefully at one point). Often, he seems to be talking to himself. He spends virtually the entire film bed-ridden or in a wheelchair or leaning on a cane. All that said, the movie actually holds up better than anybody could expect (or at least better than I expected), and it has its moments, particularly if you have a sense of humor (and like pretty striptease dancers doing their stuff). This film, incidentally, uses the word "computers" the way B-movies of 1950 use the word "radar": to pretty much encompass the entire field of potential scientific endeavor.

The Fear Chamber is available on DVD in a widescreen print from Retromedia Entertainment.

October 19

Scarface
United Artists, 1932
Directed by Howard Hawks

Starring Paul Muni, George Raft, Ann Dvorak, and Boris Karloff

We began our month-long Karloff tribute by mentioning that he rarely worked with top directors. Well, a couple of years before the opportunity to do a John Ford picture came up, Boris was in a quite memorable Howard Hawks film, too.

Scarface is a not-very-well-disguised adaptation of the Al Capone story, with Muni as the Chicago enforcer who murders his way to the top. Although professing loyalty to his bootlegger boss, Johnny Lovo, Tony Camonte (Muni) is too ambitious to be a #2 man for long ("Do it first, do it yourself, and keep on doin' it," Tony says is his motto), especially when he falls in love with the boss's hot girlfriend. Along the way, rival gangster Gaffney (the Bugs Moran equivalent, played by Karloff) has to be "dealt with" as well. Camonte's greed and his, shall we say, "over protectiveness" towards his sister eventually prove to be his downfall.

Although Scarface was filmed before Frankenstein (and during a period in which Boris was well on his way to being typecast as a mobster rather than a monster), producer Howard Hughes' months-long battles with state censors kept the film from general release, as additional scenes were shot and then discarded. Finally, in the spring of 1932, Hughes said, "The hell with it!" and released it the way he and Hawks intended it to be, figuring the box office take in the states that would play it would make up for New York and the other states where the censors had banned it. It DOES contain Italian characters who go out of their way to insult those who give their nationality "a bad name" and there's a sequence out of nowhere in which the police decry the gangsters' methods, but taken as a whole the film does glorify the mobsters who were still ruling Chicago at the time it was produced.

Karloff appears in three key sequences; the first, he's obtained a shipment of machine guns for his use in protecting the North Side, his turf, from Lovo and Camonte; in the second, narrowly having escaped the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, he's hiding out in a dilapidated hotel room, on the run; and then finally, he meets his demise while relaxing with his pals in a bowling alley.

Scarface is probably the greatest non-genre film Karloff ever made. And as early gangster pictures go, it's one of the best. Loud, violent, seamy, steamy, and Muni is gloriously, dizzily, totally nuts. I love this movie just as much as I hate the remake.

October 18

The Emperor's Nightingale
(Cisaruv Slavík)
Rembrandt Films, 1949
Directed by Jiri Trnka and Milos Makovec

Narrated by Boris Karloff

Well, where did we dig THIS one up? Frankly, I'd never heard of it and was surprised when I saw a DVD in the $3.99 bin. Karloff's name was prominently splashed across the cover of GoodTimes' "Extreme Fairy Tales" collection, and if he's not worth a penny less than four bucks, I don't know who is.

Rembrandt Films, as it turns out, was the brainchild of producer William Snyder, who penetrated the Iron Curtain in his search for family entertainment he could dub into English. Jiri Trnka was a master of stop-motion animation using colorful little puppets to tell stories. Cisaruv Slavik was based on the timeless fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen. Boris Karloff was... well, Boris Karloff.

I thought I'd never heard of this film, let alone seen it, but a couple of minutes into it I realized that it was bringing back a LOT of memories. You see, back in the 1960s my brother and I could attend all the monster movies we wanted, so long as every once in a while we tossed in a "family-type" film so our parents didn't worry that we were going to grow up to be Leopold and Loeb. Plus, we had two kid sisters, and we had to drag them to the movies from time to time. I can't begin to list all the monster movies I saw in theatres, but I can pretty much recall all of the family fare, 'cause we only went when we had to: Disney's Sword in the Stone and a reissue of Bambi; an imported version of Rumpelstiltskin; Santa Claus Conquers the Martians; Island of the Blue Dolphins; and... well, apparently, THIS film. Go figure.

In the live-action wraparound sequence, a sad, lonely little boy who seems to live alone in a big house receives a toy bird, and then he falls asleep and dreams of a young Chinese Emperor who receives and loses a pet nightingale. Like the young Emperor, in the end the boy discovers happiness lies in breaking rules and being unconventional, which no doubt gave rise to the hippie movement of the 1960s. In any case, it's an interesting moral in a Czech film.

The film is visually interesting and the animation is cute; the problem is that Boris narrates EVERYTHING. I am pretty sure this film was aimed at three year olds; anyone older than that would understand why the Emperor, having lost his bird, is looking sadly at a picture of a bird in a book without Karloff having to say, "The Emperor, having lost his bird, looked sadly at a picture of a bird in a book" or whatever he says. But he narrates down to the slightest detail; I was shocked that they just didn't have him read the closing credits, too. In fact, I'm kind of surprised he's not standing behind me, reading aloud as I type. And he's saddled with trite lines like, "The doctor came with his grim black bag, filled with unpleasant-tasting medicine. But what did the old doctor know about curing a lonely boy?”

What indeed. Apparently, the film was a success, though, because producer Snyder soon started making his own animated films, including those dreadful Popeye, Casper, and (weird but not bad) Krazy Kat TV cartoons of the 1960s.

October 17

Black Friday
Universal Pictures, 1940
Directed by Arthur Lubin

Starring Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Stanley Ridges, and Anne Nagel

Universal co-starred Karloff and Lugosi for the fifth and final time in the unusual mystery thriller Black Friday, released in early 1940.

Boris is a mild-mannered English professor at a New England university; when he’s run over and fatally injured by an escaping gangster, his friend, eminent surgeon Dr. Sovac (Lugosi), keeps him alive by a “brain transplantation” that puts the gangster’s cerebellum into Karloff’s body. A dual personality erupts; half the time, Boris sprouts poetry, while the rest of the day he's shooting coppers and strangling former gang members who are after the “late gangster’s” stashed loot. The rub is that Lugosi gets greedy and decides to nurture the criminal half of Karloff’s personality in an attempt to get the dough himself.

Well, that’s the way Black Friday was conceived, but a funny thing happened on the way to the set… Karloff was stripped of the starring role and handed the role of Dr. Sovac, while Stanley Ridges was brought in to play the English prof/murderer. That left Lugosi to take the only role left (other than the professor’s moll or daughter), one of Ridges’ former pals, a minor part that shares no scenes with Karloff.

So, wha’ happened? I’ve read a lot of conjecture over the years, from “Karloff was unconvincing as a tough gangster” to “Karloff was jealous of Lugosi, and had him bumped down in the cast list.” I discount both of those theories – he’d played a tough gangster plenty of times, and never showed any other disrespect or jealousy of Lugosi of which I’m aware. I am perfectly content with offering a pair of alternate theories; help yourselves, folks. Balcony Alternate Black Friday Theory #1: Karloff, who notoriously had several physical ailments, including a bad back, was coming off a pair of grueling shoots, having survived Son of Frankenstein in late 1938 and Tower of London in late 1939, with several films in between and around them. The lead in Black Friday would prove to be quite physically demanding, and Boris begged to play the scientist instead, a much easier part. Rather than simply switch parts with Lugosi, Universal brought in Ridges as the new male lead (Why didn't they just flip-flop Boris and Bela? Okay, think of it: Bela as a professor of English. Right. *cough cough*). Balcony Alternate Black Friday Theory #2: Director Arthur Lubin, who had never worked with Lugosi before (and never would again) discovered that his second male lead was a lousy actor with little mastery of the English language, and convinced his pal, producer Burt Kelly, that this – their first Universal horror film together – would be a bupke if they didn’t do something about it. Whatever the true story, in a final bit of irony, the film is available on DVD – as part of the so-called “Bela Lugosi Franchise Collection”. Pardon me while I chuckle.

In any case, the film – if you’re not expecting a typical Karloff/Lugosi outing, and of course you would be – is okay in a B gangster picture sort of way, and Ridges is excellent, as is Anne Nagel as his saloon-singer girlfriend. Karloff, who usually plays a sympathetic part, is actually a real stinker in this one, the greedy cad. Boris and Bela would meet again in a pair of RKO pictures, however, with happier results.

October 16

Bride of Frankenstein
Universal Pictures, 1935
Directed by James Whale

Starring Boris Karloff, Colin Clive, Ernest Thesiger, and Elsa Lanchester

Universal had wanted a sequel to Frankenstein for some time, but it wasn’t easy to get Whale, Karloff, and a workable script together. Principal filming didn’t begin until more than three years after the release of the original, and even after production was well underway, filmed scenes were deleted, new sequences were written and inserted, a few juicy murders were omitted, the film was shortened by a full quarter of an hour, and a hasty happy ending was tacked on (if you look closely, you can see Dr. Frankenstein both inside and outside the exploding laboratory).

Frankenstein and his Monster both survived the burning windmill, and mad Dr. Pretorius – who has created life from seeds, but can’t grow full-size humans – brings the two together to force the creation of a woman, a mate for the Monster.

Although at heart a macabre comedy, Bride of Frankenstein is the best monster movie Universal ever gave us and Karloff’s finest role on screen. Although he said many times that he preferred to keep the Monster mute, Boris handles both pantomime and dialog here with equal sympathy and expertise. His crying scenes (once with the blind man who befriends him, then with the Bride who rejects him) humanize the Monster but don’t make him any less terrifying. His various hand gestures (he begs for understanding and love) are masterful. The set design, Franz Waxman score, staging by Whale (particularly the creation of the Bride, who is credited as “?” but is of course Elsa Lanchester, seen in the prologue as Mary Shelley herself) and clever script are one delight after another, and Thesiger’s Pretorius is simply unforgettable: “Science, like love, has her little surprises,” he coos to Dr. Frankenstein.

A gothic masterpiece. Whale, unable to top himself, would never direct another horror film. With his legacy of this and the original Frankenstein, plus The Invisible Man and The Old Dark House, he still ranks as the greatest director the genre ever produced.

October 15

Dynamite Dan
Sunset Productions, 1924
Directed by Bruce M. Mitchell

Starring Kenneth MacDonald, Diana Alden, and Boris Karloff

As an apropos follow-up to yesterday's Boris biography, here's a look at one of his earliest available roles. Dynamite Dan is a star vehicle for young, handsome, athletic leading man Kenneth MacDonald, who -- a couple of decades later -- would be a slimy, oily villain in serials (Valley of Vanishing Men) and Three Stooges shorts (Hold that Lion) for Columbia. Here, he socks his overbearing boss down at the shipping company (good for him) and in the melee that follows, foreman Karloff swipes the payroll from the safe and blames it on good ol' Dan. Our Hero takes it on the lam, becoming first an athletic instructor at the Miss Pratt's Exclusive School for Young Ladies (!) and then a pugilist. Meanwhile Boris uses his ill-gotten gains to buy the shipping company, but unbeknownst to him that new cute secretary he's hired is Dan's sweetie, out to find the evidence that will clear her beau.

A good-natured comedy, but not a good one. Karloff does what he can with this stuff, and he sure looks young and thin. I suspect this film's corniness may have played well out in the sticks, but I hesitate to mention that for fear of insulting all of you out in the sticks, wherever that is. Dynamite Dan is available on DVD from Alpha, but not in a very watchable edition.