City of Nets (41 page)

Whale was eating lunch in the Universal cafeteria when he saw a middle-aged man with a remarkable face. He had been born William Pratt, the ninth child in a family largely devoted to the British colonial service, but as a wandering actor in Canada, supporting himself between theatrical jobs by working as a farmhand or truckdriver or whatever he could find, he took for himself a name from somewhere in his mother's family, Karloff, and preceded it with a name of his own invention, Boris.

He had drifted down to California and played a number of bit parts, and he was later to say that success was “simply a matter of being on the right corner at the right time.” Karloff's corner was the cafeteria at Universal, where he was eating lunch when an emissary from Whale came and asked him to join the director for a cup of coffee. “He asked me if I would make a test for him tomorrow,” Karloff recalled. “ ‘What for?' I asked. ‘For a damned awful monster!' he said. Of course, I was delighted, because it meant another job if I was able to land it.”

At forty-four, Karloff was still no more than a journeyman character actor. His top rate was $150 a week, and he had already made thirteen movies that year. Now he stoically consigned his future to Universal's chief makeup man, Jack Pierce. This virtuoso, who was later to create such cosmetic marvels as the Mummy and the Wolf Man, blamed himself for Lugosi's failure as the Frankenstein monster. Before letting Karloff be tested, he spent three weeks experimenting in what a monster should look like. He investigated various aspects of anatomy and surgery. “I discovered there are six ways a surgeon can cut the skull,” he said later, “and I figured Dr. Frankenstein, who was not a practicing surgeon, would take the easiest. That is, he would cut the top of the skull straight across like a pot lid, hinge it, pop the brain in, and clamp it tight. That's the reason I decided to make the Monster's head square and flat like a box and dig that big scar across his forehead and have metal clamps hold it together. The two metal studs that stick out the sides of his neck are inlets for electricity—plugs. Don't forget that the Monster is an electronic gadget.”

Every aspect of the monster's appearance had to be worried about. “My first problem,” Pierce said, “was not to let his eyes be too intelligent, which is why I decided to use the false eyelids that half veil the eyes.” These were made of rubber and glued onto Karloff's eyelids, then covered with a layer of wax. Then there was the porous-looking skin, which Pierce built up with layers of cheesecloth, and the coloring, which was supposed to be grayish-white but didn't look right under klieg lights until Pierce used a grayish-green tone. It took the makeup man three and a half hours every morning to apply all his magic to Karloff's face, and nearly as long every evening to wipe it off. And then Karloff had to be dressed in a double-quilted suit with a short-sleeved coat, to make his arms look longer, and propped up with steel struts, to make his legs stay stiff, and shod with huge eighteen-pound boots used by asphalters, to achieve a properly lumbering gait. Thus outfitted, he stood seven and a half feet high and could hardly move. “We shot
Frankenstein
in mid-summer,” Karloff recalled. “After an hour's work, I would be sopping wet. I'd have to change into a spare undersuit, often still damp from the previous round. So I felt, most of the time, as if I were wearing a clammy shroud. No doubt it added to the realism.”

Realism, of course, was not what made
Frankenstein
a pop classic. Like the original novel from which it so markedly differed, it had the quality of a fable, fabulous both in its exaggerations and in its essential innocence. And Karloff endowed the monster with a kind of guileless charm. In its day, though, it was considered quite shocking. At a preview in Santa Barbara, one woman and her daughter ran screaming from the theater, so Universal edited out the scene in which Karloff accidentally drowned the girl with whom he had been picking flowers. The studio also decided to change the ending, in which Frankenstein and the monster both died in the flames of a burning mill. In the revised version, the aristocratic scientist survived to hear his father propose a toast “to a son of the house of Frankenstein.” Carl Laemmle, Sr., also insisted that his son provide an introductory warning about how horrifying the film was, and “if any of you do not care to subject your nerves to such a strain, now's your chance to . . .” And so on.

It was an enormous success, and deservedly so. And coming right after Lugosi's
Dracula,
it inspired Hollywood's imitators to create a whole cycle of horror movies. The first actual sequel was the admirable
Bride of Frankenstein
(1935), in which a frizzy-wigged Elsa Lanchester was brought to life as a companion for the lonely monster—and rejected him. Then, almost inevitably, came
Son of Frankenstein
(1939). But the horror stars were believed to transcend their roles. Universal combined Karloff and Lugosi in its far-fetched version of Poe's
The Black Cat
(1934) and
The Raven
(1935). By the end of the 1930's, though, the endless reworking of the formulas had become rather tiresome.
Dracula
had given birth to
Son of Dracula
(written by Siodmak) and
Dracula's Daughter; The Invisible Man
had led to
The Invisible Woman
(also by Siodmak);
The Mummy
reappeared in
The Mummy's Hand; The Werewolf of London
evolved into
The Wolf Man,
and then came
Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man
(Siodmak again).

Karloff, who appeared in some of these things, and worse, was always very professional (he was one of the founders of the Screen Actors Guild and took pride in possessing membership card number nine), but he did wonder why all the mad-scientist plots had to be so similar: “A man who gets hold of [an] idea,” as he put it, in a quite unconscious analogy to the Hollywood view of the rise of fascism, “where if he can work it out right (some new force, new medicine, or a new way of operating) it will be of enormous value to mankind at large. But he becomes fanatical about it, and the thing goes wrong, and he goes wrong with it. He goes off his head, and reluctantly, in the last act, you have to destroy him. . . .” Perhaps better writers might concoct some new ideas, Karloff suggested to Harry Cohn, who had signed him up for a series of thrillers at Columbia. “He was in an expansive mood,” Karloff recalled. “He opened the desk drawer and pulled out a great chart. ‘Here,' he said, ‘here's your record. We know exactly how much these pictures are going to make. They cost so much. They earn so much. Even if we spent more on them, they wouldn't make a cent more. So why change them?' ”

The one man who tried to change this system, early in the 1940's, was Val Lewton, a Russian-born writer of poetry and short stories, whose history of the Cossacks somehow led David Selznick to hire him as a consultant on a projected film version of Gogol's
Taras Bulba.
Nothing ever came of that, but Lewton began earning credentials as an executive. RKO decided in 1942 to make a series of cheap thrillers and put Lewton in charge of them. Then, in typical Hollywood style, Charles Koerner, the head of the studio, met somebody at a party who suggested that he should make a movie called
Cat People.
The next morning, Koerner passed that on to Lewton as an order, and Lewton called together a few friends and said, “I don't know what to do.” When
Cat People
was remade in the 1970's, there was much gory clawing to suit the modern sensibility, and that was probably what Koerner wanted from Lewton, but it was not what Lewton was willing to produce. “The only way he would do it,” said Jacques Tourneur, who eventually directed the film, “was not to make the blood-and-thunder cheap horror movie that the studio was expecting but something intelligent.” The script that Lewton eventually got from DeWitt Bodeen was ominously ambiguous: A fashion designer, played by Simone Simon, thought she was descended from a group of women who could turn themselves into cats, but though the studio eventually insisted on one shot of a real panther crouching for the kill, it remained uncertain at the end exactly what Miss Simon's supernatural powers were.

That was the trademark of Lewton's films: a horrendous title to please the studio and a story that suggested but never demonstrated the implications of the title. Bodeen had written a play about the Brontës, so Lewton commissioned a script loosely based on
Jane Eyre,
which did very nicely under the title
I Walked With a Zombie
(1943). And though
The Leopard Man
(also 1943) implied that a series of murders in New Mexico might have been committed by a runaway leopard, the most frightening scene was one in which a girl was forced by her mother to go and get some groceries after dark, and walked in terror through the empty streets, and managed to carry the groceries home, and only then encountered the horror, of which the audience heard only an animal snarl and saw only a trickle of blood.

If Lewton wanted to be enigmatic, the RKO chiefs decided, he would have to be provided with a moneymaking star, and so they presented him, to his ill-concealed dismay, with Boris Karloff. Lewton hated monster movies, hated all the clichés that his bosses and his audiences loved, and so he cast Karloff in three strangely sadistic films,
The Body Snatchers
and
Isle of the Dead
(1945) and
Bedlam
(1946). This last one, in which Karloff played the cruel warder of the celebrated London insane asylum and ended being walled up alive by his patients, was so grim that the British censors banned its release there for years. In a sense, they were right, for most horror movies have a tendency toward morbidity, and the nearer they get to reality, the more dangerous that tendency becomes.

The classic horror films were not really supposed to be horrible. They were mildly symbolic legends, fairy tales, and so, when Boris Karloff sent John Carradine off to wreak vengeance on his prosecutors in
The House of Frankenstein,
Carradine remained (except when he occasionally turned into a large bat) an elegant figure in evening dress. As he showed his magic ring to Mayor Russmann's beautiful daughter-in-law, she looked admiringly at it and said, “I see glimpses of a strange world where people are dead.” Carradine pressed the ring on her, naturally, and then she said, “I see your world more clearly now. I am no longer afraid.” And he said, his eyes glittering, “I shall return for you before the dawn.”

Who could object? Only her stodgy husband, who had been poking around in the wine cellar for something to offer the distinguished guest, then came upstairs to find his wife embracing the vampire in the garden and departing in the vampire's coach. And then, in a wonderful but unconscious parody of all chase scenes, the husband set out to find help and soon joined forces with some mounted police, and though these horsemen should have been able to catch the vampire's coach in good time, the camera lovingly portrayed an interminable pursuit. Carradine was trying, of course, to return before sunrise to the coffin in Professor Lampini's wagon, filled with the ancestral Transylvanian soil. But the pseudo Lampini (Karloff) wanted to flee from any difficulties with the authorities. And so there followed the extraordinary spectacle of the galloping police somehow unable to overtake the vampire's much slower coach, and the vampire's coach unable to overtake Karloff's still slower circus wagon. Karloff eventually decided to throw out the vampire's coffin, and Carradine then tried to stop his carriage, which promptly fell on its side. As the dawn sky brightened, Carradine crawled toward his coffin, and the first rays of the rising sun turned his outstretched hand into the bones of a skeleton.

And that was just the first half hour of
The House of Frankenstein.
The remarkable thing was that Siodmak, the master of sequels and spin-offs, managed to include here not just a sampling of horror-movie clichés but virtually every cliché that existed. When Karloff and the hunchback duly reached the house of Frankenstein, they found not only the mechanical monster frozen in ice but also a frozen werewolf, left there at the conclusion of Siodmak's
Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man.
They lit fires and thawed out the Wolf Man, who promptly returned to his “natural” form as an amiable if bewildered-looking young man named Lawrence Talbott (Lon Chaney, Jr.). Karloff's first order of business, though, was to punish the authorities who had incarcerated him, and now that he had lost the services of John Carradine, he reverted to his traditional weapon, the brain transplant. “The monster is put in a glass case where steam will soften his frozen tissues,” according to one synopsis of the unsynopsizable, “while Niemann and Daniel capture Strauss and Ullmann, the last remaining witnesses against the doctor. Niemann removes their brains for his fiendish plan of revenge. Ullmann's is to be inserted into the Monster, the Monster's brain into Talbott, and Talbott's into Strauss. . . .”

The one monster left out of this game of musical brains was Daniel, the homicidal hunchback, to whom Karloff had originally promised, before he got so involved in brain transplants, a handsome new body. This was particularly important to the hunchback because he had just fallen in love with a
zaftig
Gypsy girl named Ilonka, and she ignored him because she herself had just fallen in love with the burly Talbott. Talbott morosely confessed to her that he had a problem, which only she could solve by shooting him with a silver bullet when he came in pursuit of her at the next full moon. Quick shot of full moon scudding through clouds, then one of those wonderful sequences in which Jack Pierce's makeup magic made the whiskers sprout and the fangs grow. Lo, the snarling Wolf Man.

Ilonka was a little hesitant about firing her silver bullet, so she was clawed to death before she managed to do her duty. This outraged poor Daniel, who had now lost the main incentive for the new body that Karloff had been too busy to give him. Daniel lugged the girl back to Karloff's laboratory, intending to demonstrate the mad doctor's guilt and then to kill him. This intrusion in the midst of Karloff's effort to reactivate the Frankenstein monster naturally aroused the hostility of the reviving monster, who lurched off his laboratory table, grappled with the frenzied hunchback, and finally flung him out a window. By now, of course, it was time for Siodmak's last cliché: the crowd of villagers marching toward the accursed castle with all their torches ablaze. And so on.