a sinister and stately grace

[teenybuffalo]

ALERT ALERT: if you love monster movies and have never seen Boris Karloff in The Mummy (1931), get ye to the Brattle Theatre today at 4:00.  It's not only the ur-source for mummy movies and sinister ancient Egyptian sorcery movies, it's one of the earliest uses I've ever seen of the genre where an immortal-sexy-evil-magic dude seeks his

Comments

[kestrell]

I should let you host some of these movies in the aerye. One of the things I like about this era of horror films is the stylized slow movements, which seem almost dance-like. I don't know what it is about actors who have backgrounds in movement, but they just seem to emote much more vividly to me. I've already mentioned my joy in listening to Robin Williams, because I can actually perceive his physical movements, and somehow this makes him just that much more funny

[teenybuffalo]

I don't think it's just rambling at all. By now there have been generations of actors who worked solely in TV and film and rarely went near a stage, whereas the earliest film actors would usually come from a stage background. And the productions they're in are often very stagey, if they're working from a famous source material

[sovay]

Apparently Karloff (birth name William Henry Pratt) was one-quarter or one-eighth East Indian.

. . . and his great-aunt was Anna Leonowens?

Well, that was a pop-culture smash-up I wasn't expecting.

In a few of his young pictures he has an enormous mustache to balance his huge eyebrows, and that's the only point where he looks Indian to me

It's a better look for him than the pencil moustache, if nothing else. Thank you: I'd never seen any photographs of him that young.

Rather more appealingly, Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff play a pair of former friends who are heavily implied to have been shagging back in their youth. ("The years have been kind to you," says one on beholding the other for the first time in decades.) The movie is about their torturing each other.

Nobody needed slash in the days of Hammer and Universal, did they? It just wrote itself kindly for you.

[negothick]

Bela Lugosi Jr. is a lawyer. A friend who used to work in "the industry" said that Bela Jr. was the lawyer on the long-running lawsuit by the children of Moe Howard family to recover Three Stooges royalties.

[teenybuffalo]

Good for him. Lugosi Sr. spent enough time being screwed by The Industry that it's extra-nice his son's working for the interests of actors.

[asakiyume]

Nobody needed slash in the days of Hammer and Universal, did they? It just wrote itself kindly for you.

Haha! Auto-slash.

Teeny, I will be back to comment on your entry proper soon!

[moon_custafer]

I love The Black Cat -- mainly because of how it just keeps piling it on. I mean by the time Poelzig reveals he's also the head of the local satanic coven it's almost an afterthought. I'm not even sure if he really believes in it or if it's just something he does for the lulz. And then it turns out he's got a pipe organ in his torture dungeon/dynamite stash and I just shrug and say "well of course he does."

[teenybuffalo]

He has a PIPE ORGAN?! I clearly need to watch this film again, because I have no memory of that at all. Poelzig's fabulous dressing gowns, yes. Total lack of resemblance to actual work by Poe, yes. "Cave canem" incantation, yes. Not the pipe organ.

My "of course he does" moment is when I realize that there is a kill switch, just like there is at Pretorius Labs, Inc. (Why the hell do the two doctors need to have an instant suicide blowy-uppy death leever in the old watchtower?) (that typo was intentional)

If I were an evil genius I would refrain from this. I'd store my acids a long way from my bases, and have sturdy peasants cart out the whole dynamite stash and store it in sheds at a safe distance. I'm sure this is all on the Evil Overlord list by now.

[sovay]

(Why the hell do the two doctors need to have an instant suicide blowy-uppy death leever in the old watchtower?)

"You'll never take me alive, you bastards*?"

* ingrates, idiots, small-minded fools, etc.

[asakiyume]

I'm baaaaack. (Heh. I'm sure you were holding your breath)

Let me direct your gaze to The Black Cat (1934), in which Karloff plays a character named Hjalmar Poelzig who is basically Alistair Crowley except also a war criminal who has stuffed and mounted his past girlfriends and wives.

Haha! And he actually walks around with a black cat in his arms! Pretty excellent!

That Rasputina video is also altogether excellent. And I absolutely agree with you about Boris Karloff's face.