This is the FINAL WEEK of BORIS KARLOFF MONTH!

Week One can be found HERE. Week Two can be found HERE. Week Three can be found HERE.

I. Introduction to Karloff Month

Mr. Boris Karloff was the most loved and respected "Horror Icon" of all time. Through the silent era, he struggled to make a living in motion pictures, and it wasn't until 1931, when he had officially passed into middle age in his 40s, that he got his "big break" by being cast as the indestructible Frankenstein Monster in director James Whale's timeless horror classic. That key role was shortly followed by The Old Dark House, The Mummy, The Ghoul, The Black Cat, The Raven, and on and on... a decade later, he conquered Broadway by starring in one of the biggest hits of the era, the spoof spookshow Arsenic and Old Lace, which made him a legend in ways movies couldn't (back then, to be a Broadway star meant you were at the top of the entertainment pyramid). His film career continued to be varied and impressive; amongst his classics of the decade were House of Frankenstein, Bedlam, and The Body Snatcher. In the 1950s and 1960s, his film work slowed but he was a frequent and popular guest on a variety of TV shows, as well as starring in such successes as Thriller and narrating the perennial favorite How the Grinch Stole Christmas. By the time of his death (February 1969, at the age of 81), "Uncle Boris" was one of the beloved character actors in the history of movies. More than that, he gave a "gentle face" to horror... I think I speak for a lot of "Monster Kids" of the era when I say that my folks didn't give me TOO hard a time about all the horror films I watched, 'cause if I was watching good ol' Boris, the nice guy who sang on the Dinah Shore program and who was known to work in his garden while wearing nothing but his underwear and a top hat, not to mention the fact that THEY had grown up watching his movies, well... Friday and Saturday night "Creature Features" were okay.

In the long history of FNF, back in the VHS days things like theatrical trailers were rarely put on the tapes, and you had to try and track down a compilation tape from the grey market, when you could. Absent that, we had to simply announce at the end of the program what they'd be seeing next week. If we said The Mummy's Tomb or House on Haunted Hill or Creature from The Black Lagoon or whatever, that was fine. But we never had to say which Karloff picture we were playing. "A Karloff movie" was good enough for them. And it still is. Boris was a man of great talent and great conscience (he was one of the founders of the Screen Actors Guild) who rarely worked with "A" list directors but rarely gave a bad performance and who made several films unforgettable by his presence.... FNF is proud to salute this great star with a 31-day retrospective of some of his most memorable (and a few of his most unmemorable) movies, one a day in the month of October 2007... BORIS KARLOFF MONTH In The Balcony! Oh King, May you Live Forever!

October 31

Targets
Paramount Pictures, 1968
Directed by Peter Bogdanovich

Starring Boris Karloff, Tim O'Kelly, Nancy Hsueh, and Peter Bogdanovich

In 1968 Los Angeles, aging horror film star Byron Orlok has decided to retire. He's depressed that in the 1930s, he could handle a variety of character roles, but now all he's asked to do are horror films. He feels that time has passed him by, that in the era of real-life mass killings and violence in the streets, there's no room for scary pictures: the horror has taken over real life. Unbeknownst to Orlok, at his final public appearance -- the premiere of his new film, The Terror -- he's going to come face to face with one of those horrors, a demented, gun crazy young man who has butchered his own family and is now using a small arsenal to pick off people from a sniper's nest.

Apparently, Roger Corman discovered that Karloff owed him a few days' worth of work, and he told his assistance, Peter Bogdanovich, that if he could work up a suitable script and kept it under a certain (very low) dollar amount, he'd have the chance to direct it himself. He even threw in stock footage from The Terror, an earlier Corman/Karloff collaboration, at no extra charge. The result is a low-budget but quite interesting thriller that brings Karloff into the modern era and offers him his best role in years. As Orlok, he's playing himself of course, but one senses that the weariness and cynicism he shows have a basis in how he actually must've felt. The scene where he's watching himself sadly during a TV screening of The Criminal Code is a special highlight of the film. Bravo to Bogdanovich for presenting Karloff with -- and this is the highest praise we can give -- a fitting capstone to a 50-year film career.

Targets is available in a deluxe edition, with bonus material and Bogdanovich commentary, from Paramount at a very cheap rate (we found it for $5.99).

The Haunted Strangler
Amalgamated/MGM, 1958
Directed by Robert Day

Starring Boris Karloff, Anthony Dawson, Jean Kent, and Vera Day

The 1950s was not a particularly good decade for Mr. Karloff; despite an audience reinterest in horror films that grew throughout the decade, giant bugs and sea monsters took precedence over gothic horrors. After a string of truly lousy films (thankfully, some of the most obscure of his career), including Monster of the Island, The Hindu, and Voodoo Island, Boris received a script written specially for him, Strangle Hold, about a novelist who reopens a long-closed file on a serial killer, only to discover that an innocent man was hanged and the real Haymarket Strangler still survives as a Jekyll-Hyde personality. He had to go to England, to his old friend Alex Gordon, to get financing, but the film was made and released there under the title Grip of the Strangler (a great title, connoting Karloff character's obsession, the Jekyll personna's tenuous grip on reality, and the Strangler's method of dispatching his victims) and here under the title The Haunted Strangler, where it played on a double-bill with Fiend without a Face.

This is an unusual picture, undeniably slow in spots and the hidden identity of the killer is revealed midway through, making the second half seem anti-climactic in some ways. But oh my gosh, check out Boris in the last 25 minutes of the film -- it seems impossible that this 70-year-old actor could summon up the strength to do what we see him doing onscreen. It's a great performance, and left me with even more admiration for his abilities as an actor.

The Criterion Collection offers more than 400 outstanding films from around the world; they're a prime source for cinematic masterpieces in amazing deluxe packages that set the standard for truly great DVD releases. So imagine our surprise when they released something called the "Monsters and Madmen" collection, with First Man Into Space, The Atomic Submarine, The Haunted Strangler, and another Karloff film, Corridors of Blood (1959). Now, nobody is going to call rank any of these films as among the greatest in history, but it's a nice little package with spectacular bonus material, including feature commentary, and arguably the greatest single presentation of Karloff material on DVD. Highly recommended, but don't expect Ran or Seven Samurai, okay?

October 29

Black Sabbath
American International Pictures, 1964
Directed by Mario Bava

Starring Boris Karloff, Mark Damon, and Michele Mercier

Okay, first things first: I don't find many Boris Karloff films scary. I do find, however, Black Sabbath to be borderline terrifying, and I have since seeing it when it first played our local theatre back in '64. The Black Sabbath I knew was a good movie; it opened with a sequence that still ices my blood, A Drop of Water, about the corpse of a dead witch who wants her stolen ring back. After that came a boring bit with a ghost haunting a beautiful woman on The Telephone, and then the film's best sequence, with Karloff playing a real honest-to-goodness monster for the first time in a long time, The Wurdalak.

The thing I didn't know then, though, was that what American audiences saw as Black Sabbath was in fact an Italian film called I Tre Volti Della Paura, or The Three Faces of Evil. Apparently, there's an Italian version of that, an international version, plus the American version, and only the latter actually features Karloff's undubbed voice. Recently, Starz/Anchor Bay released a very nice DVD of Black Sabbath that features an anamorphic widescreen presentation of the international version, and I'm here to tell you that, although I've never been much of a Bava fan (except for this one and Black Sunday), his original cut of the film transcends anything I was expecting. It's a horror masterpiece, and one of Karloff's finest films.

The differences are important. First, in the international version, Boris only introduces the film and is around for a (very, very funny) wrap-up. In the American version, Karloff is doing a bad Alfred Hitchcock impersonation, commenting on each part of the trilogy, and the wrap-up is missing. The first sequence in the international version is The Telephone, which turns out to be a very well done psycho lesbian thriller with a twist. Next is The Wurdulak, and it remains a beautifully atmospheric terror tale, and Karloff's best straight horror role since The Body Snatcher. Finally, A Drop of Water closes the film and sends the audience home to turn on all the lights and check under the bed.

For those of you who think you'd only be interested in viewing the American version of Black Sabbath, all I can say is, check out the original version... despite missing Karloff's voice, it's a gem.

October 28

House of Frankenstein
Universal Pictures, 1944
Directed by Erle C. Kenton

Starring Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney, John Carradine, and J. Carroll Naish

After an absence of more than four years, in 1944 Karloff made a triumphant post-Arsenic and Old Lace return to the Universal lot, juicy contract in hand for two new films. The first was his Technicolor debut, The Climax, which owed much to the previous year’s remake of Phantom of the Opera. The second film, Universal brass decided, would return Karloff to the Frankenstein series in which he had first won fame. No, the pushing-60 Karloff wouldn’t be asked to don the giant boots and heavy makeup of the Monster; this time, he’d play the mad scientist who brings the creature back to life. And since the previous year’s Frankenstein meets the Wolf Man had been such a hit, Lon Chaney, Jr.’s werewolf was invited back, too, along with Count Dracula, in the person of John Carradine. Escaped con Karloff and his hunchbacked assistant (Naish) travel the European countryside in the guise of Dr. Lampini and company, purveyors of a traveling House of Horrors exhibit. Along the way, they meet up with the three main scaremeisters in the Universal canon (one assumes the Mummy was busy elsewhere) and murder the three men who were responsible for putting Karloff behind bars 15 years earlier. Talk about holding a grudge!

The result, originally envisioned as The Devil’s Brood but released as House of Frankenstein, is unsatisfying as a monster movie – Count Dracula is a separate shaggy dog story, and never meets the other boogeymen (and where is Bela Lugosi? Another teaming with Karloff seems to have been called for); Chaney and the Monster don’t appear until the film is more than halfway through; the Wolf Man literally has only a few seconds of screen time. As a vehicle for Karloff, though, as it was intended, it’s satisfactory, even though he’s offscreen for long stretches. The whole thing seems rather cobbled together, and I suspect much was left on the cutting room floor: sequences appear to be missing, and in some shots you can see mouths moving but no dialog sprouting forth.

The monsters would reunite several months later for House of Dracula, but by that time, Karloff had moved over to RKO and joined the Val Lewton House of Horrors company.

October 27

The Comedy of Terrors
American International Pictures, 1963
Directed by Jacques Tourneur

Starring Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, Boris Karloff, Basil Rathbone, and Joyce Jameson

A quarter-century after Tower of London, Karloff, Price, and Rathbone were reunited for this all-star black comedy, aided by Peter Lorre and Joe E. Brown. Price is a drunken undertaker who likes to drum up business for himself, Lorre is his reluctant assistant, Karloff is his deaf, doddering father in law, and Rathbone is one of his intended victims. Jameson is the long-suffering wife of the undertaker.

At turns, Comedy of Terrors is both quite amusing and quite tedious. Joyce Jameson's horrid opera singing wrecks much of the picture; it's hard not to fast-forward through it. On the other hand, Lorre is hilarious, and the interaction between him and Price is well worth the price of admission. Karloff and Rathbone ended up switching roles at the last minute; poor Boris wasn't ambulatory enough to handle all the stomping around called for in the part of Mr. Black, the penurious landlord who won't stay dead no matter how many times Vincent Price kills him. Karloff spends much of the film sleeping, but when he has something to do, he's hilarious, and his lower-class accent is a joy to hear. The guy knew what he was doing and how to get laughs.

Although I've always liked this film just well enough to keep watching it, I couldn't help but wonder if either James Nicholson or Sam Arkoff ever had the thought, "We've got Richard Matheson, the guy who wrote Shrinking Man, and Jacque Tourneur, who directed Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie. Maybe we should let them come up with something a little more worthy of them and our stars than this."

Probably not.

October 26

The Nickel-Hopper
Pathe/Hal Roach, 1926
Directed by F. Richard Jones

Starring Mabel Normand, Michael Visaroff, Oliver Hardy, James Finlayson, and Boris Karloff

In 1926, Karloff was picking up work wherever he could get it. The guy was about to turn 40, and he was still struggling to make a good living at his dedicated craft, but things were finally looking up a bit. The New York Times noticed him in showy role as a narcotics fiend in Her Honor, the Governor, and he scored a major part in the Lionel Barrymore thriller The Bells. In between, though, came things like this: a small, unbilled, but key (and very funny) bit in this quite worthwhile Hal Roach 3-reeler.

By night, Mabel is a nickel-a-dance girl down at the local hall, catering to low-budget swells and various guys in uniform. By day, she takes in children and laundry and cares for her father, who spends all of his time (a) avoiding looking for work, and (b) complaining about high taxes. Much of the film shows the kind of riff-raff dance hall girls had to put up with, from over-active octogenarians to bad dancers with big feet to mashers who won't take "NO" for an answer; Mr. Karloff falls into that latter category. She ends up borrowing $10 from him, which she promptly gives to a blind peddler. When Karloff tries to retrieve the dough, a cop is called, and Boris gets to do a double-take and demonstrate his ability to run funny. He's no Jerry Lewis in that department, but he's capable enough. The rest of the film concerns itself with Mabel's date with a genuine nice guy she meets; her shiftless father doesn't approve, so she can't bring him home, but the home she DOES bring him to (so that he won't know where she lives) is owned by James Finlayson ("D'oh!"), who thinks Mabel's a burglar and calls the cops. Slapstick ensues.

The best part of this short is Oliver Hardy as a hopped up, totally frantic jazz drummer at the dance hall. He's hysterical. Imagine what a comedy team Karloff & Hardy would've been...

"He said I look like BORIS KARLOFF!"

A few months before the release of The Nickel-Hopper, Hal Roach produced a wonderful Charley Chase comedy called Long Fliv the King, which also featured Mr. Hardy. But check out that prison guard at the beginning of the film... I think it's Karloff in another small, unbilled part unnoticed by filmographies (and the IMDB). What do YOU think, Balconeers? Is that BORIS KARLOFF?!? Drop us a line at balconymailroom (one word) at yahoo.com and tell us what you think. And YES, we know that the Frankenstein monster picture is him... that's there for comparison, you big silly!

October 25

Juggernaut
Grand National, 1936
Directed by Henry Edwards

Starring Boris Karloff, Joan Wyndham, Mona Goya, and Anthony Ireland

After several days of watching some of my favorite Karloff films, I thought it'd be fun to view one I hadn't seen before. Grand National was a brand-new studio in the fall of 1936, and studio head Edward Alperson wanted to hit the ground running: he signed both Jimmy Cagney and Boris Karloff to star in pictures, and introduced a new find, a young cowboy star named "Tex" Ritter.

Juggernaut, based on a book by popular mystery novelist Alice Campbell, features the well-to-do on the French Riviera, a cast of characters that includes filthy rich old men with their young, beautiful wives and a string of cads who, ahem, "entertain" the wives in return for being kept in nice clothes, nice cars, and gambling money. Lady Yvonne Clifford can't keep her paramour happy, and her rich but sick old husband is getting tired of her shenanigans. She stumbles across Dr. Sartorius (Karloff), who badly needs money to continue his scientific experiments. A deal is struck: Sartorius will "attend" to Lady Yvonne's husband, and once he's out of the way, share in the loot. The doctor's pretty nurse, though, stumbles across the plot, leading to the suspenseful climax.

Every actor and actress in the picture stinks except for good ol' Boris, which may have been Grand National's problem. When the film was over, I watched the opening credits again, trying to figure out how many of the cast and crew Mona Goya had to sleep with to get the part of Lady Yvonne: she's not only a terrible actress, she's a terrible actress with an accent as thick as concrete. She's the female Bela Lugosi with none of the old-world charm. "I don't mind for science," she explains to Sartorius, and no, I have no idea what that means. Subtitles should pop up whenever she opens her mouth."I haff giv'n you da BEST years off my LIFE!" she rails at her aged husband, and while I DO know what that means, the fact that she's 24 and he's 80 gives the entire sequence a loony hilarity.

Grand National's product didn't live up to the ballyhoo (including Great Guy and Something to Sing About, the Cagney pictures) and by 1940 the studio was kaput. They left behind a lot of interesting B movies, though, in the public domain, which means they're readily available from a variety of sources.Karloff? He moved on to Fox, Warners, and finally back to Universal, where he belonged. 

October 24

The Man with Nine Lives
Columbia Pictures, 1940
Directed by Nick Grindé

Starring Boris Karloff, Roger Pryor, Jo Ann Sayers, and Byron Foulger

And here's another wonderful Karloff film I think is underrated, the second (of five) films in the Columbia "Mad Scientist" series. (We covered #3, Before I Hang, earlier this month.)

Dr. Mason (Pryor) is working on experiments in freezing cancer patients and destroying the bad cells, following up on the work of a mysterious Dr. Kravaal, who disappeared a decade earlier. Mason and his fiance/nurse decide to go looking for Kravaal, and poke around his rotting house on a small island on the U.S./Canadian border. There, the nurse falls through the rotting floorboard and they discover an ice cave in which Kravaal and a party of lawmen have been frozen for 10 years. Thawed, Kravaal decides to recreate his experiment, but he's going to need plenty of human guinea pigs; lucky he's got a bunch of unwilling ones on hand.

Okay, unlike the last three Karloff films I've watched, nobody is going to claim that The Man with Nine Lives is a really good movie. Actually, it's really dumb. But it's irresistably so; the science is so daffy, the actors are so weirdly cast, and the story is such hokum that it's impossible not to enjoy every reel of the darn thing. I love Dr. Mason's experiment, which opens the film: they freeze a woman for a week by putting ice cubes on her chest, pointing electric fans at her, and taking her temperature with a thermometer that never touches her body. Oh, and get this: they thaw her out by (you're gonna think I'm kidding; I'm not) pouring hot coffee down her throat through a funnel. And Dr. Mason himself! In a part that calls for, oh, Robert Lowery, we get Roger Pryor, who looks like the illegitimate son of Franklin Pangborn and Og Oggilby. And it's even fun to watch this "cancer doctor" leave the operating room and immediately light up a Chesterfield. What a fun movie! The Man with Nine Lives is on DVD, but not included with the four Columbia films in that "Icons of Horror" Karloff set; you'll have to purchase it separately. It's worth it.

October 23

The Sorcerers
Tigon/Allied Artists, 1967
Directed by Michael Reeves

Starring Boris Karloff, Ian Ogilvy, Catherine Lacey, and Susan George

What say you that we continue on with Karloff films that I think should get more attention? Today's film is The Sorcerers, and it's one people seem to like -- but only if they've actually been able to SEE the darn thing. While there's a Special Edition anamorphic widescreen DVD available in England, it hasn't crossed the pond yet, and so America waits to view one of the final chances Karloff had to star in a really good movie.

Boris is stately old Professor Monserrat, who with his wife has created a means by which they can experience life through the senses of a willing young victim, sorry, "test case". The guinea pig is Mr. Ogilvy, a bored young man who's been talked into the experiment. Well, it works, and the Monserrats can indeed experience whatever he feels. Not only that, they have the power to manipulate him, too... and Mrs. Monserrat is hell-bent on experiencing a variety of thrills through the young man, including swimming, motorcycle racing, and murder. When Karloff tries to stop her, she beats the hell out of him(!) until he's powerless to intervene.

After the 1940s, it seems that Boris Karloff was an anachronism, rarely playing a modern-day character. He was either cast in costume dramas (The Strange Door, Corridors of Blood, Black Sabbath) or he appeared to be a 19th century character walking around (or wheeling around) in modern times (Die, Monster, Die). The Sorcerers puts him in modern dress, in modern times, and it's fascinating to see him dressed quite nappily in the beginning of the picture (he dresses in a Mr. Rogers' sweater later on), and he looks terrific in this film. According to the documentary on the DVD, Karloff thought the script had potential, and worked hard on the film, even contributing ideas for rewrites to improve it, suggestions writer/director Reeves gratefully accepted. Reeves famously did NOT get along as well with his next horror star, Vincent Price: they argued throughout the filming of WItchfinder General. Sadly, director Reeves -- a major young talent -- died of a drug overdose only a week after Karloff's death in February, 1969.

The Sorcerers is not a masterpiece, but it's a damn good movie, and how many of THOSE did Karloff get to make the last years of his life?

October 22

The Ghoul
Gaumont-British Films, 1933
Directed by T. Hayes Hunter

Starring Boris Karloff, Cedrick Hardwicke, Ernest Thesiger, and Ralph Richardson

Forget this whole "Jolson Sings!" and "Garbo Laughs!" stuff; how about "Karloff Walks!" Following Universal's success with Frankenstein, The Old Dark House, and The Mummy, Boris (who was, we recall, one of the founders of the Screen Actors Guild) asked the studio for a raise. He didn't get it, and so he walked. Actually, he sailed: he returned to England, where Gaumont was ready to welcome him home with a monster picture of their own.

Karloff is an aged Egyptologist who, on his deathbed, believes that the Eternal Light, a jewel in his possession, will grant him immortality if he presents it to Anubis upon his passing. He's sure his greedy family is going to take the jewel, which is bound up in his hand, as soon as he breathes his last. So he warns them: you take that gem, and I'm a-comin' back to get it. He's got his family pegged, though, and he soon has some postmortem cleaning up to do.

After nine films in release in 1932, The Ghoul would be Karloff's lone 1933 offering, and over the years it all but became a lost film. Finally, a truncated, poorly transferred version was available on VHS from various public domain companies in the 1980s, supposedly from the only available print, found decomposing in an Eastern European vault. Imagine our delight, then, in 2003 when MGM released a DVD with a beautifully restored, uncut version of the film from Janus... and this is a film that deserves to be seen. It is, along with Bedlam (reviewed last week) one of the two Karloff films I champion the most, because they're terrific films that fly under a lot of people's radar. MGM didn't help by releasing the DVD with no fanfare, with a generic cover (picturing a big green eyeball, for some reason) and no mention of Karloff's name unless you read the tiny print on the back. In any case, this is an excellent "monster stalking around a great big, dark, creepy mansion" thriller, and look up again at that supporting cast (you'll love Thesiger in this film; he plays a droll Irish servant with a thick brogue who's got no idea what Karloff is up to, but is convinced that he's going straight to hell for it). The Ghoul is ripe for reappraisal.