Cover Cavalcade

 MARCH IS BORIS, ROD AND RIPLEY MONTH!!

This George Wilson cover is from 1970.

Cover Cavalcade

 MARCH IS BORIS, ROD AND RIPLEY MONTH!!

A George Wilson cover from 1966.

Cover Cavalcade

 

JULY IS GOLD KEY HORROR MONTH!

A George Wilson cover from 1964.

Cover Cavalcade

 

JULY IS GOLD KEY HORROR MONTH!

This 1971 cover is tentatively credited to George Wilson.

"Pain and the knife, they're inseparable!"

If you look at the above poster, then you think "Aha! Corridors of Blood (1958) is a horror movie and Karloff is playing yet another mad scientist and/or mad killer!"

But the poster is lying to you--or at least showing Karloff without sufficient context. He's not the bad guy. He's the tragic hero.

I had never seen this one. I ran across it while looking through a streaming service the library at which I work is trying out for a month. When I noticed that it stared Karloff and that Christopher Lee was in it--playing a henchman to the main villain named Resurrection Joe--then I realized I had to watch it. Resurrection Joe is one of the best henchmen names ever.





The movie is set in 1840s London, with Karloff playing a skilled surgeon. What makes him skilled is his speed. There is no such thing as anesthetic, so you have to operate quickly to minimize a possibly fatal level of pain and shock.

Dr. Bolton (Karloff) isn't just good with a knife. He's also compassionate, running a free clinic for the city's poor and experimenting with different drugs in an attempt to make an effective anesthetic. His peers at the hospital are skeptical of this last goal. "Pain and the knife," pontificates one of them, "they're inseparable."

Bolton refuses to accept this. But, while his intentions are good, but his methodology is a bit lacking. He experiments on himself and, before long, he's addicted to the drugs he's using.


Karloff's performance is nuanced and heartfelt--a man desperate to find a way to operate without causing pain and to simply help people in need. As he grows more and more addicted and this affects his ability as a surgeon, we feel nothing by sympathy for him. We've watched a good man--with at first the most noble intentions--gradually destroy himself.

Circumstances bring Dr. Bolton into the circle of Black Ben (Francis De Wolff). Ben owns a seedy tavern, but makes his real money luring indigent drunks inside and then having Resurrection Joe smother them with a pillow. The bodies are then sold to the hospital for medical training. 

The glitch in this business is that he needs a doctor to sign a death certificate for each body. When Bolton's deteriorating condition gets him removed from his post at the hospital and leaves him without access to the hospital pharmacy, he cuts a deal with Ben. He'll sign a stack of blank death certificates. In exchange, Ben will send Joe to help Bolton break into the pharmacy and get what he needs--primarily a bottle of opium.

Joe ends up killing the night watchmen. To his horror, Bolton finds himself trapped in the company of villains and quickly becoming useless to them.

Karloff's brilliant performance is the lynch pin for the whole movie, but the supporting cast is also excellent. The sets, costumes and dialogue effectively recreates the time period. I also like the Dickensian attitude towards class structure--the movie condemns an attitude we see among the the upper class when it is indifferent to the suffering of the poor. But there is no excuse given for those among the poor (Big Ben and Resurrection Joe) who have turned to crime. There is a moral balance here that I find admirable and ethically healthy.

So this isn't really a horror movie, though there are elements of that genre present. It's a combination of thriller and historical drama that is well-acted and tells a strong story. That darn poster is a big, fat liar. For that matter, so's the movie's trailer:

Cover Cavlacade

If fiction has taught us nothing else, it's that you never get a hand transplant and use the hand of a murderer. That never ends well.

A not-so-mad scientist

Boris Karloff played his share of mad scientists over the years, but in the 1937 movie Night Key,

he plays a scientist who isn't mad at all.

Well, not mad-crazy. David Mallory (Karloff) does get mad-angry when the owner of a private security company uses a technicality in a contract to get out of paying Mallory a lot of money.

Mallory has a way to fight back, though, using a new device he's invented to disable burglar alarms installed by the security company. He then breaks in to various businesses without stealing anything, but leaving taunting messages signed "Night Key."

A small-time crook appropriately named Petty Louie is helping out Mallory, though he's constantly annoyed that he's not allowed to steal anything. Thinking that he's helping Mallory out, he contacts The Kid--the youthful leader of a gang of criminals.

This actually doesn't help much. Mallory is soon being forced to use his Night Key for actual robberies. He manages to outsmart the crooks once, but then they kidnap his daughter to force his cooperation. That doesn't mean he's not willing to out-smart them again, but now there's a lot more at stake.

This is a fun movie--a perfect example of how effectively the low-budget B-movies from that era told stories. The plot moves along swiftly but logically, basically giving us a crime drama with an element of science fiction. (Well, sci-fi by 1937 standards. None of the electronics used would seem that far out today.)

Karloff--as he pretty much always did--gives a great performance. Mallory is an old man, nearly

blind without his glasses and physically feeble. There are moments in the film when Karloff uses these traits to exude a deep sense of helplessness.

But Mallory also has moral courage, a fair dollop of physical courage and the ability to continually think his way out of trouble. He can't match the crooks physically, but perhaps he can get the best of them anyways.

The supporting cast is great as well. Hobart Cavanaugh really makes us believe that Petty Louie begins the story as a hapless crook but ends it as someone willing to risk his life for a friend. Members of the gang include Ward Bond (one of my favorite character actors) and Frank Reicher (Captain Englehorn from King Kong). Jean Rogers (Dale Arden from the first two Flash Gordon serials) is Mallory's daughter.

This movie was made because Boris Karloff was contracted to be used in one more movie at Universal Studios, but the new owners thought the horror genre (Karloff's usual oeuvre) was dead. A few years later, the Universal executives would green-light Son of Frankenstein and discover the horror genre still had some life in it. But perhaps that gap in making horror films was a fortunate one. Because of it, we got movies such as Night Key. And the world would be a poorer place without it.

Not everyone loves Lucy--someone wants to strangle the poor girl!

Before Lucille Ball had a chance to really demonstrate her brilliance as a comedic actress on the small screen, she did land a few dramatic roles on the big screen.

One of her finest parts is in a nifty and slightly-noirish whodunit called Lured (1947). Lucy plays an American girl working as a taxi dancer in London. When a friend disappears--apparently the victim of a serial killer--she agrees to help Scotland Yard lay a trap for the killer. She begins to answer personal ads (that's how the killer has met his victims), hoping to smoke out the bad guy.

Lucy plays a tough, smart gal who's quick with wisecracks and who can think on her feet. And she does an admirable job.  And 66 years later, when she's now cemented in the public consciousness as a screwball comedienne, it's a tribute to her performance that we can set that aside for the length of the movie and accept her in as an ad hoc police woman.

The film works as a whodunit, with no real clues pointing to the killer for most of the film. In fact, the premise is designed to allow any number of red herrings to be tossed to us. As Sandra (Lucy's character) meets various people through the personals, we can't know at first which of them might be a psychotic murderer. Boris Karloff has a wonderful cameo as a somewhat daft dress designer and there's a whole subplot built around Sandra stumbling across a criminal enterprise completely separate from the serial killer.

A host of great character actors give backbone to the story. George Sanders, Cedric Hardwicke, Alan Napier (Alfred from the old Batman TV series, ironically playing a cop named Gordon) and others all bring life to their roles. George Zucco is particularly notable as the cop assigned to watch over Sandra while she's meeting people. Zucco and Lucy build up a really nice rapport in their scenes together.

And it's actually interesting that there's someone out there plotting to kill Lucy and it turns out NOT to be Desi because of one of her whacky schemes to get a part in his show.

A Poem and Two Films

Edgar Allan Poe's stories and poems are so vivid that it's natural for filmmakers to turn to him quite often with the intent of adapting his stuff to celluloid. But most of his poems and short stories are pretty.. well.. short.  So if you're going to make a movie out of Poe (even if it's a B-movie that only runs an hour), you've got to add a lot of extra stuff.

That's what happened both times Poe's poem "The Raven" was turned into a movie. In both cases, the finished product really doesn't have a lot to do with the poem, but there is a slight connection in each case that does kinda sorta make sense.

In the mid-1930s, Universal Studios was teaming up their two horror stars--Karloff and Lugosi--in a series of films to play off their respective successes in Frankenstein and Dracula. Several of these films were loosely based on works of Poe.

The poem "The Raven" was about obsession with a lost love (and perhaps taking a perverse pleasure in dwelling on that loss). The 1935 film version gave us Lugosi as neurosurgeon Dr. Richard Vollin, a man at first obsessed with Poe and then obsessed with a woman he couldn't have. So he invites the girl, her boyfriend and her dad to his mansion for a party. His plan: kidnap and torture them all to death with methods that had been used in Poe's stories.

So the theme of obsession with someone you can't have runs through both works. Other than that, though, the movie is pretty much an original story.

And that's just fine, since it's a fun story. Karloff plays a killer on the run from the law who asks Vollin to perform plastic surgery on him. Vollin instead scars half of Karloff's face (Jack Pierce's makeup job here is perfect) and promises to fix him only after he helps carry out Vollin's nefarious scheme. Vollin's mansion, equipped with secret doors, rooms rigged to act like elevators and a hidden torture chamber, is the perfect setting for a horror movie

Karloff, as usual, is great in his role. He plays a brutal killer, but he still generates an aura of sympathy. And in the end, when he struggles over whether to keep helping Vollin or help a girl who acted kindly towards him, he demonstrates a deep emotional conflict with just his expression and a few terse words of dialogue. The Raven would have been a fine B-movie regardless, but Karloff's performance helps make it even better.


'
Nearly three decades later, Karloff returned to "The Raven" one more time. This time around, it was the 5th of 8 films based on Poe's work that were directed by Roger Corman. 1963's The Raven was written by Richard Matheson, who dealt with expanding the short poem into a full-length film by using the idea of a raven flying into a room and speaking to a man, then going off in a pretty much completely original direction from there. He also decided to make it a comedy, something that hadn't yet been done in the Corman-Poe cycle.

You may notice, though, that neither the poster nor the trailer (posted below) tell you that the film is a comedy. A plot summery doesn't really hint at this either. But it is all played for laughs and it is a really, really funny movie

The man visited by a raven is mild-mannered magician Erasmus Craven (Vincent Price), who is still mourning his two-years dead wife Lenore. The raven isn't actually a raven, but a magically transformed man named Adolphus Bedlo (Peter Lorre). Craven turns Bedlo back into Bedlo, then learns that Bedlo had been turned into a raven by Dr. Scarabus (Boris Karloff), a powerful magician and old rival of Craven's father.

Craven's supposedly dead wife Lenore has been seen at Scarabus' castle. So Craven, Bedlo, Craven's daughter Estelle and Bedlo's cloying son Rexford all pay Scarabus a visit.

This all turns out to be a plot by Scarabus to steal Craven's magical secrets and this in turn leads to a truly epic duel between the two wizards.

As I said, none of that tells you its a comedy. But it's often hilariously funny.  Price, Lorre and Karloff were all great comedic actors when they needed to by and they play off each other seamlessly, with Price most notably bringing real charm to his role as a mild-mannered but ultimately powerful magician.

And the whole movie looks magnificent. In a DVD extra, Roger Corman explains that the sets from previous Poe films were each kept intact and added to by the budget of the next successive film in the cycle. By the time they got to The Raven, the sets that made up Scarabus' castle were elaborate and elegant.

So there you have it. Two films both supposedly based on "The Raven," though both maintain a very tenuous connection to the poem. But both great films in their own way.

Boris, Bob and Bill Take a Road Trip

I only occasionally write about television on this blog, since I'm perpetually annoyed that television is responsible for bringing the Golden Age of Radio to an end. I'm equally annoyed with the existence of reality television and any game show that allows contestants to scream when they win something.

But during the now over 60 years that TV has been an important part of our culture, there have been (by my count) a total of 27 television series that were worthwhile in terms of good storytelling and cool characters, each of them scoring over a 7.0 or higher on the Bogart/Karloff Coolness scale. There's actually another 18 series that score between a 6.0 and a 7.0 and thus also deserve an occasional mention.

That makes for a pretty small percentage considering the hundreds of television series that have come and gone since the late 1940s, so perhaps that means we should value the good stuff all the more. And in the four years or so I've kept this blog, I have written about the original Star Trek, Combat, The Untouchables, Bat Masterson, Outer Limits, The Twilight Zone and even The Time Tunnel (though the overall quality of that latter show can be legitimately argued.)

So this week I'll add one more TV series to that list: I Spy, starring Robert Culp and Bill Cosby as spies who posed as a professional tennis player and his trainer.  It really was a great show, with solid scripts, great location work, a lot of humor and excellent rapport between Culp and Cosby.

The show as a whole has a Bogart/Karloff Coolness rating of 8.7, but the one particular episode I want to talk about gets a nearly-unobtainable 9.9. This, in large part, is because it guest-starred one of the two actors that the Bogart/Karloff scale is actually named after.

Boris Karloff, one of the finest actors ever and by all accounts a true gentleman in real life, made everything he appeared in that much more classy. (Heck, he even gave bad movies and TV shows a degree of class.) In the I Spy episode "Mainly on the Plain," he plays an eccentric Spanish professor who has developed a method of building an effective anti-missile system. But he is disdainful of politics, refusing to give his secret to either the West or the East.

So Kelly Robinson (Culp) and Alexander Scott (Cosby) are assigned to befriend him and convince him to share his secret with the right side. They discover that Don Ernesto Silverando (Karloff makes no attempt to affect a Spanish accent, but it doesn't matter at all) is a fan of the novel Don Quixote. He is, in fact, obsessed with Don Quixote, considering Cervantes' would-be knight as an ideal of bravery and chivalry.

Poor Don Ernesto is kind of missing the point of the novel, which Cervantes meant to be a pretty vicious parody of such romantic views of medieval feudalism. But, be that as it may, he soon drags Kelly and Scotty on a cross-country drive to Madrid. Because his car is filled with multiple editions of Don Quixote, the two spies have to follow him in a separate vehicle. Just like Sancho Panza followed along behind Don Quixote.

Before long, Don Ernesto is forcing them to act out scenes from the book, attacking a windmill (which results in Kelly getting a butt-full of buckshot from an enraged mill worker) and leading them in an attack on an "army" of sheep. But when Don Ernesto "rescues" a paddy wagon full of crooks from the local cops, the good guys really start to get worried. Not that the Communist assassin on their trail didn't already have them worried.

What's really cool about Karloff's performance is that neither he nor the script plays Don Ernesto purely for laughs. As the episode progresses, it becomes apparent that the valuable secret the don holds is really weighing him down--that his escapes into Quixote-inspired fantasy are his way of dealing with the potentially destructive knowledge only he has. People might die because of something he created and that's a reality he just doesn't want to face.

Karloff brings a palpable sense of pathos to the role, giving the otherwise almost purely comedic episode a real heart. He takes a character that might have been nothing more than a clown and endows him with sincere humanity.

And, when the trio is captured by the assassin and some henchmen, it's the brave actions of Don Ernesto that turns the tide against the villains.

Read even a little bit about Boris Karloff and you discover that he was a gentleman and a generous man with a heart for children in need. I think that these real-life traits were an important part of his success as an actor. I think the reason he brought such class into the parts he played in movies, radio and television was that he was overflowing with class in reality. I think that's why he was the best actor ever.

Boris Karloff vs. the Great Detectives

Boris Karloff was a wonderful actor. Everything he did as an actor--from Frankenstein's Monster to the narrator of The Grinch That Stole Christmas, was done with class and style. Whether the film he was in was an A film or a B film (or, in a few cases, a Z film), he was pretty much always worth watching.


Many of his best roles were bad guys, so we tend to remember those best. And that's just as well--because Karloff (though by all accounts a true gentleman in real life) could always create one heck of a bad guy.


And during the course of his career, the villainous version of Karloff got to go up against a couple of the best and most famous of the fictional detectives.


The first time was in Charlie Chan at the Opera (1936). Karloff plays an amnesiac opera singer who has recently escaped from an asylum. Soon after, people start turning up dead backstage during a performance. Karloff is there--using his knowledge of backstage passages and trap doors to stay hidden. But is he guilty of the murders--or is someone else using his presence to cover his or her own guilt?


Like all the Chan films featuring Warner Oland as the master detective and Keye Luke as his son Lee, Charlie Chan at the Opera has a strong story and great production values. It's a cracking good mystery with an appealing protagonist and (of course) a great villain. Karloff's portrayal of a mad man only barely hanging on to his last shreds of sanity is downright creepy, but also forces us to feel a level of sympathy for the man.

Eleven years later, Karloff went up against Dick Tracy in Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome (1947). This time, Karloff is a ruthless street thug (of course, when you're stuck with a name like Gruesome, you're pretty much doomed to grow up to be a ruthless street thug.) He gets hold of an expermental gas that freezes people up like statues when they breath it, allowing him to pull off a bank robbery or two. Along the way, he also makes time to double-cross a few of his comrades in crime. No sympathy for this character--but then there didn't have to be this time around. Gruesome's job is to be as gruesome as possible in every possible way--and Karloff manages this effortlessly.

The Dick Tracy films made at RKO in the late 1940s are all lively and enjoyable efforts. This one arguably has the weakest story, but with Karloff as the bad guy, good production values with film noir-ish lighting effects and a really neato gun battle at the climax, it still makes for a good time.

So Boris Karloff got to go up against Charlie Chan and Dick Tracy. The detectives manage to bring him to heal, of course, but he gives them both a run for their money. I only which he'd gotten a chance to go up against Sherlock Holmes. I would have loved to see how he would have interpreted Professor Moriarty.

Happy Birthday, Boris Karloff

Yesterday--November 23--would have been the 120th birthday of the wonderful actor Boris Karloff.

Of course, he's best known for the part that gave him fame--Frankenstein's Monster. He played the Monster in three films, Frankenstein (1931), Bride of Frankenstein (1935), and Son of Frankenstein (1939). He was excellent all three times, making us sympathize with the Monster while still bringing across a sense of real menance.

But Karloff was great in all his films. I think his best performance is in a 1946 film titled Bedlam, in which he played the corrupt master of an 18th Century London insane asylum. He's the best part of one of the best movies ever--a story that manages to be spooky and intelligent at the same time. Like all the best horror movies of the 1930s and 1940s, it reminds us that it's possible to tell a scary story without grossing us out.

Karloff was also wonderful on dramatic radio. He guest-starred many times on the horror show The Inner Sanctum, where he was especially good in the episodes titled "Birdsong for a Murderer" and "The Wailing Wall." He was magnificent playing the villianous Uriah Heep in a Theater Guild on the Air adaptation of David Copperfield.

November 23 would also be the birthday of John Dehner. He's one of those character actors who would pop up in a zillion different TV shows and movies during the '50s & '60s, one of those guys you always recognize but can never name, but he really shined on old-time radio.

He was in the radio version of Gunsmoke nearly every week, always playing a different role. He might be anything from a uneducated mountain man to a rich cattle baron, but he would always be believable.

He played the lead in two old-time radio shows. He was Paladin in the radio version of Have Gun, Will Travel (which was a rare case of a show starting on television, then going to radio: it was usually the other way around), but his best show was Frontier Gentleman. In this, he played a reporter from the London Times who traveled the American West in the 1880s, looking for human interest stories. It was a classy, intelligent show with good scripts and good production values.

Karloff and Dehner. Two completely different actors who both contributed much of what is worthwhile to our popular culture. Karloff has been gone for four decades now and Dehner passed on 15 years ago, but the great stories they were a part of are still here for us to enjoy. Happy birthday to them both.