Showing posts with label 1931. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1931. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 3, 2023
1931 Alternate Oscars
A great year for moving pictures. Charlie Chaplin, Fritz Lang and René Clair turned in the best work of their careers. James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, Clark Gable, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Peter Lorre and Joan Blondell all went from bit players to stars. And Universal Studios launched its classic horror cycle with Frankenstein and Dracula ...
Sunday, May 6, 2018
1931 Alternate Oscars
My choices are noted with a ★. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔.
I have previously written essays about several of the movies and performers from 1931. Click the highlighted link to read them: City Lights, Dracula, Frankenstein, Le Million, the Marx Brothers' Monkey Business, Norma Shearer, Peter Lorre, Joan Blondell, Rene Clair, The Public Enemy and Little Caesar.
Friday, March 2, 2018
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
Peter Lorre's Birthday
Did you know it was Peter Lorre's birthday? Well, now you do. This is what I wrote about him previously, in my review of Fritz Lang's M.
He spent his entire professional life playing mad scientists, sinister criminals and oily little weasels, his goggle-eyes and oft-imitated raspy, accented voice became the movie personification of evil, and yet nothing in Peter Lorre's long film career quite prepares you for his chilling portrayal of movie history's first serial killer, Hans Beckert of Fritz Lang's classic psychological thriller, M.
No charming, chianti-sipping killer is Beckert—he preys on little girls, luring them with balloons and candy and kind words before leading them into the woods or an empty lot to perform his sadistic, depraved rituals. That by the end of the movie you also question the motives and methods of Beckert's would-be judges, indeed, that some in the audience even feel sympathy for him, is a testament to Lorre's talent, Lang's direction and Thea von Harbou's screenplay, and though he played the part in 1931 and literally hundreds of imitators have followed, I would argue Lorre's Beckert is the most convincing portrait of a serial killer ever essayed, one that makes more recent depictions seem like what they in fact are—cartoon monsters and manipulative contrivances.
As the movie opens, Berlin is already in turmoil as a serial killer preys with impunity on the city's children, eight so far, with the promise of more murders to come.
"Just you wait," sing the children as they play a game, "it won't be long/The man in black will soon be here/With his cleaver's blade so true/He'll make mincemeat out of you!" not quite grasping, as their panicked parents do, just how close the danger really is. And indeed, as one of the children, little Elsie Beckmann, wanders away from her playmates to bounce a ball against a poster seeking information about the killer, Peter Lorre's shadow appears in profile. His back to us, whistling a tune, he buys the girl a balloon and quietly leads her away.
And then as Elsie's mother calls for her child with greater and greater urgency, we see some of the most unforgettable images in movie history—the ball rolling out of the woods, the balloon caught in a power line—that signal that despite all the precautions, another murder has taken place. Unlike the other famous motion picture monsters of 1931, Dracula and Frankenstein, this monster has lost none of his power to shock and there's no retreating into the comforting reassurances that it's just a movie—M was inspired by real events and they are repeated today with appalling regularity.
Lorre actually spends relatively little time on screen and has only one large speaking part, hence the supporting award. In fact, M is first and foremost a police procedural, maybe the first in movie history, as well as a scathing attack on the German society then in the process of sweeping Hitler into power. But it's Lorre's performance that holds the movie together, breathes a sinister life into it, and afterwards, he's what you remember.
We glimpse his shadow, his back, briefly his face a mirror, but not until nearly fifty minutes into the movie do we see Lorre full on, buying an apple from a street vendor. And it's as he's feeding this physical hunger that he sees his next victim and another, terrible hunger hollows him out.
"I have to roam the streets endlessly," he later says, describing the moment, "always sensing that someone's following me. It's me! I'm shadowing myself! Silently, but I still hear it! Yes, sometimes I feel like I'm tracking myself down. I want to run—run away from myself! But I can't! I can't escape from myself! I must take the path that it's driving me down and run and run down endless streets! I want off! And with me run the ghosts of the mothers and children. They never go away. They're always there! Always! Always! Always! Except—when I'm doing it—when I—Then I don't remember a thing. Then I'm standing before a poster, reading what I've done. I read and read—I did that? I don't remember a thing! But who will believe me? Who knows what it's like inside me? How it screams and cries out inside me when I have to do it! Don't want to! Must! Don't want to! Must! And then a voice cries out, and I can't listen anymore! Help! I can't! I can't! I can't!"
It's Lorre's only lengthy speech of the movie, but boy, what a speech, and so convincing is his anger, fear, pleading, wheedling, all the classic stages of grief in the face of a certain death sentence, some critics and audience members forget that it's a self-serving rationalization.
The very first time we see Lorre's face, in a mirror, he's pulling comical faces, "to see in himself the monster others see in him," as Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert puts it, and enjoying what he sees. He writes taunting letters to the newspapers while whistling the same tune he whistled as he killed little Elsie Beckmann. And he has the presence of mind to break off a pursuit of a new victim when there's a chance he'll get caught.
It takes a brilliant piece of acting to make you forget that this sweaty, self-loathing weasel has murdered nine children. Viewers (then and now) aren't used to this sort of complex characterization and they wait in vain for the director and the actor to tell them how to feel and what to think. Lorre and Lang were going for something deeper, more lasting. Is he insane, is he bluffing, what should the mob do with him? Here's the messy reality, the movie says, make of it what you will.
Peter Lorre was born Laszlo Lowenstein in 1904 in Austria-Hungary (now Slovakia), but ran away to Vienna at an early age where he worked as a bank clerk and (he claimed) studied briefly with Sigmund Freud before turning to acting, a profession so difficult to break into that Lorre later said, "I am the only actor, I believe, who really had scurvy." Moving to Berlin, the young actor worked with playwright Bertolt Brecht, starring in Mann ist Mann where he came to the attention of Fritz Lang. His performance in M made him an international star.
The Jewish Lorre fled Germany in 1933 soon after the Nazis came to power, eventually landing in London where he starred in Alfred Hitchcock's 1934 thriller The Man Who Knew Too Much. At the time of his first interview with Hitchcock, Lorre spoke little English and bluffed his way through the conversation by watching as Hitchcock told stories and then laughing uproariously whenever he thought the director had reached a punchline. Whether Lorre fooled Hitchcock, I can't say, but Lorre got the part and learned his lines phonetically.
His performance in The Man Who Knew Too Much led Lorre directly to starring roles in Hollywood, beginning with Mad Love and Crime and Punishment in 1935. He followed those with dozens of suspense and mystery movies for Warner Brothers including eight Mr. Moto movies, and in 1941 perhaps his best Hollywood role, that of Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon.
The latter movie was the first of Lorre's nine pairings with character actor Sydney Greenstreet, surely one of the most unlikely of Hollywood's successful screen teams, one tall and overweight with a bellowing English stage actor's voice, the other short and thin with a raspy German accent, neither of them remotely attractive and usually playing criminals. Outside of The Maltese Falcon and 1943's Casablanca, the best of their pairings was probably The Mask of Dimitrios, an atmospheric conspiracy thriller that has Lorre and Greenstreet backtracking the trail of the mysterious Dimitrios Makropoulos, international assassin, smuggler and spy.
Despite a career of unforgettable supporting work, Lorre was never nominated for an Oscar.
During the television era, Lorre made numerous guest appearances spoofing his own image and he was often imitated. His cartoon self frequently battled Bugs Bunny, Robin Williams imitated him in Disney's Aladdin and he was the inspiration for Ren in the animated series Ren and Stimpy. In 1997, the Brooklyn band The World/Inferno Friendship Society released an album entirely about Lorre entitled Addicted to Bad Ideas: Peter Lorre's Twentieth Century. Last year BBC radio broadcast Michael Butt's play Peter Lorre v. Peter Lorre.
Lorre himself shrugged at the sincerest form of flattery. "All that anyone needs to imitate me," he said, "is two soft-boiled eggs and a bedroom voice."
Although as a performer he reached legendary status, Lorre was in his personal life lonely and depressed, addicted to morphine, bad with money. He was married three times and fathered one child, a daughter, Catherine. He worked right up until his death in 1964.
He spent his entire professional life playing mad scientists, sinister criminals and oily little weasels, his goggle-eyes and oft-imitated raspy, accented voice became the movie personification of evil, and yet nothing in Peter Lorre's long film career quite prepares you for his chilling portrayal of movie history's first serial killer, Hans Beckert of Fritz Lang's classic psychological thriller, M.No charming, chianti-sipping killer is Beckert—he preys on little girls, luring them with balloons and candy and kind words before leading them into the woods or an empty lot to perform his sadistic, depraved rituals. That by the end of the movie you also question the motives and methods of Beckert's would-be judges, indeed, that some in the audience even feel sympathy for him, is a testament to Lorre's talent, Lang's direction and Thea von Harbou's screenplay, and though he played the part in 1931 and literally hundreds of imitators have followed, I would argue Lorre's Beckert is the most convincing portrait of a serial killer ever essayed, one that makes more recent depictions seem like what they in fact are—cartoon monsters and manipulative contrivances.
As the movie opens, Berlin is already in turmoil as a serial killer preys with impunity on the city's children, eight so far, with the promise of more murders to come.
"Just you wait," sing the children as they play a game, "it won't be long/The man in black will soon be here/With his cleaver's blade so true/He'll make mincemeat out of you!" not quite grasping, as their panicked parents do, just how close the danger really is. And indeed, as one of the children, little Elsie Beckmann, wanders away from her playmates to bounce a ball against a poster seeking information about the killer, Peter Lorre's shadow appears in profile. His back to us, whistling a tune, he buys the girl a balloon and quietly leads her away.
And then as Elsie's mother calls for her child with greater and greater urgency, we see some of the most unforgettable images in movie history—the ball rolling out of the woods, the balloon caught in a power line—that signal that despite all the precautions, another murder has taken place. Unlike the other famous motion picture monsters of 1931, Dracula and Frankenstein, this monster has lost none of his power to shock and there's no retreating into the comforting reassurances that it's just a movie—M was inspired by real events and they are repeated today with appalling regularity.Lorre actually spends relatively little time on screen and has only one large speaking part, hence the supporting award. In fact, M is first and foremost a police procedural, maybe the first in movie history, as well as a scathing attack on the German society then in the process of sweeping Hitler into power. But it's Lorre's performance that holds the movie together, breathes a sinister life into it, and afterwards, he's what you remember.
We glimpse his shadow, his back, briefly his face a mirror, but not until nearly fifty minutes into the movie do we see Lorre full on, buying an apple from a street vendor. And it's as he's feeding this physical hunger that he sees his next victim and another, terrible hunger hollows him out.
"I have to roam the streets endlessly," he later says, describing the moment, "always sensing that someone's following me. It's me! I'm shadowing myself! Silently, but I still hear it! Yes, sometimes I feel like I'm tracking myself down. I want to run—run away from myself! But I can't! I can't escape from myself! I must take the path that it's driving me down and run and run down endless streets! I want off! And with me run the ghosts of the mothers and children. They never go away. They're always there! Always! Always! Always! Except—when I'm doing it—when I—Then I don't remember a thing. Then I'm standing before a poster, reading what I've done. I read and read—I did that? I don't remember a thing! But who will believe me? Who knows what it's like inside me? How it screams and cries out inside me when I have to do it! Don't want to! Must! Don't want to! Must! And then a voice cries out, and I can't listen anymore! Help! I can't! I can't! I can't!"It's Lorre's only lengthy speech of the movie, but boy, what a speech, and so convincing is his anger, fear, pleading, wheedling, all the classic stages of grief in the face of a certain death sentence, some critics and audience members forget that it's a self-serving rationalization.
The very first time we see Lorre's face, in a mirror, he's pulling comical faces, "to see in himself the monster others see in him," as Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert puts it, and enjoying what he sees. He writes taunting letters to the newspapers while whistling the same tune he whistled as he killed little Elsie Beckmann. And he has the presence of mind to break off a pursuit of a new victim when there's a chance he'll get caught.It takes a brilliant piece of acting to make you forget that this sweaty, self-loathing weasel has murdered nine children. Viewers (then and now) aren't used to this sort of complex characterization and they wait in vain for the director and the actor to tell them how to feel and what to think. Lorre and Lang were going for something deeper, more lasting. Is he insane, is he bluffing, what should the mob do with him? Here's the messy reality, the movie says, make of it what you will.
Peter Lorre was born Laszlo Lowenstein in 1904 in Austria-Hungary (now Slovakia), but ran away to Vienna at an early age where he worked as a bank clerk and (he claimed) studied briefly with Sigmund Freud before turning to acting, a profession so difficult to break into that Lorre later said, "I am the only actor, I believe, who really had scurvy." Moving to Berlin, the young actor worked with playwright Bertolt Brecht, starring in Mann ist Mann where he came to the attention of Fritz Lang. His performance in M made him an international star.
The Jewish Lorre fled Germany in 1933 soon after the Nazis came to power, eventually landing in London where he starred in Alfred Hitchcock's 1934 thriller The Man Who Knew Too Much. At the time of his first interview with Hitchcock, Lorre spoke little English and bluffed his way through the conversation by watching as Hitchcock told stories and then laughing uproariously whenever he thought the director had reached a punchline. Whether Lorre fooled Hitchcock, I can't say, but Lorre got the part and learned his lines phonetically.His performance in The Man Who Knew Too Much led Lorre directly to starring roles in Hollywood, beginning with Mad Love and Crime and Punishment in 1935. He followed those with dozens of suspense and mystery movies for Warner Brothers including eight Mr. Moto movies, and in 1941 perhaps his best Hollywood role, that of Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon.
The latter movie was the first of Lorre's nine pairings with character actor Sydney Greenstreet, surely one of the most unlikely of Hollywood's successful screen teams, one tall and overweight with a bellowing English stage actor's voice, the other short and thin with a raspy German accent, neither of them remotely attractive and usually playing criminals. Outside of The Maltese Falcon and 1943's Casablanca, the best of their pairings was probably The Mask of Dimitrios, an atmospheric conspiracy thriller that has Lorre and Greenstreet backtracking the trail of the mysterious Dimitrios Makropoulos, international assassin, smuggler and spy.Despite a career of unforgettable supporting work, Lorre was never nominated for an Oscar.
During the television era, Lorre made numerous guest appearances spoofing his own image and he was often imitated. His cartoon self frequently battled Bugs Bunny, Robin Williams imitated him in Disney's Aladdin and he was the inspiration for Ren in the animated series Ren and Stimpy. In 1997, the Brooklyn band The World/Inferno Friendship Society released an album entirely about Lorre entitled Addicted to Bad Ideas: Peter Lorre's Twentieth Century. Last year BBC radio broadcast Michael Butt's play Peter Lorre v. Peter Lorre.
Lorre himself shrugged at the sincerest form of flattery. "All that anyone needs to imitate me," he said, "is two soft-boiled eggs and a bedroom voice."Although as a performer he reached legendary status, Lorre was in his personal life lonely and depressed, addicted to morphine, bad with money. He was married three times and fathered one child, a daughter, Catherine. He worked right up until his death in 1964.
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
The Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards Redux (1931-1932)
Universal Studio's cycle of classic horror movies officially began in early 1931 with Bela Lugosi's Dracula, but for me, it's Frankenstein that really kicked it off. Boris Karloff and James Whale only made three movies together—Frankenstein, The Old Dark House and Bride of Frankenstein—but it feels like more than that, maybe because this trio of movies established so many of the conventions of the genre. Or maybe because they're just that good.1932 also saw the release of Scarface, the best gangster movie made before The Godfather despite starring Paul Muni rather than James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart or Edward G. Robinson. But Howard Hawks directed it and given that he makes a serious claim to the title of best American director ever, maybe I shouldn't be surprised after all.
As for the actress awards, I was tempted when I expanded the Katies to the "Golden Globe" format to bump Joan Crawford up from supporting to lead and give her the award for drama. But I like Mae Clarke, the girl who got the grapefruit in the face in The Public Enemy, and I've got a later award in mind for Joan. Feel free to argue with me. My mind is subject to change.
PICTURE (Drama)
winner: Frankenstein (prod. Carl Laemmle, Jr.)
nominees: Freaks (prod. Tod Browning); Grand Hotel (prod. Irving Thalberg); Scarface (prod. Howard Hughes); Waterloo Bridge (prod. Carl Laemmle Jr.)
Must-See: The Champ; Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde; Emma; Five Star Final; Frankenstein; Freaks; Grand Hotel; Scarface; Shanghai Express; Skyscraper Souls; Tabu: A Story Of The South Seas; Waterloo Bridge; What Price Hollywood?
PICTURE (Comedy/Musical)
winner: The Music Box (prod. Hal Roach)
nominees: Monkey Business (prod. Herman J. Mankiewicz); Private Lives (prod. Irving Thalberg); The Smiling Lieutenant (prod. Ernst Lubitsch)
Must-See Comedy/Musical: The Guardsman; Monkey Business; The Music Box; One Hour With You; Private Lives; Red-Headed Woman; The Smiling Lieutenant
PICTURE (Foreign Language)
winner: À Nous La Liberté (prod. Frank Clifford)
nominees: La Chienne (prod. Pierre Braunberger and Roger Richebé); I Was Born, But ... (prod. Shochiku Film); Mädchen in Uniform (prod. Carl Froelich and Friedrich Pflughaupt); Marius (prod. Robert Kane and Marcel Pagnol)
Must-See Foreign Language Pictures: À Nous La Liberté; La Chienne; I Was Born, But ...; Mädchen In Uniform; Marius
ACTOR (Drama)
<winner: Fredric March (Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde)
nominees: Wallace Beery (The Champ); Paul Muni (Scarface); Edward G. Robinson (Five Star Final); Warren William (Skyscraper Souls)
ACTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy (The Music Box)
nominees: James Cagney (Blonde Crazy); Maurice Chevalier (The Smiling Lieutenant and One Hour With You); The Marx Brothers (Monkey Business); Robert Montgomery (Private Lives)
ACTRESS (Drama)
winner: Mae Clarke (Waterloo Bridge)
nominees: Constance Bennett (What Price Hollywood?); Marlene Dietrich (Shanghai Express); Barbara Stanwyck (The Miracle Woman); Dorothea Wieck (Mädchen in Uniform)
ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Norma Shearer (Private Lives)
nominees: Joan Blondell (Blonde Crazy); Claudette Colbert (The Smiling Lieutenant); Lynn Fontanne (The Guardsman); Jean Harlow (Platinum Blonde and Red-Headed Woman)
DIRECTOR (Drama)
winner: Howard Hawks (Scarface)
nominees: Tod Browning (Freaks); Edmund Goulding (Grand Hotel); Rouben Mamoulian (Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde); James Whale (Frankenstein and Waterloo Bridge)
DIRECTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: René Clair (À Nous La Liberté)
nominees: Sidney Franklin (The Guardsman and Private Lives); Ernst Lubitsch (The Smiling Lieutenant and One Hour With You); Yasujirô Ozu (I Was Born, But ...); James Parrott (The Music Box)
SUPPORTING ACTOR
winner: Lionel Barrymore (Grand Hotel)
nominees: John Barrymore (Grand Hotel); Boris Karloff (Frankenstein); Raimu (Marius); Roland Young (The Guardsman and One Hour With You)
SUPPORTING ACTRESS
winner: Miriam Hopkins (The Smiling Lieutenant and Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde)
nominees: Joan Crawford (Grand Hotel); Ann Dvorak (Scarface); Aline MacMahon (Five Star Final); Anna May Wong (Shanghai Express)
SCREENPLAY
winner: Ben Hecht; continuity and dialogue by Seton I. Miller, John Lee Mahin and W.R. Burnett; from a novel by Armitage Trail (Scarface)
nominees: René Clair (À Nous La Liberté); Frances Marion (story), Leonard Praskins (dialogue continuity) and Wanda Tuchock (additional dialogue) (The Champ); Christa Winsloe and Friedrich Dammann (as F.D. Andam); from the play by Christa Winsloe (Mädchen in Uniform); S.J. Perelman and Will B. Johnstone (screenplay); Arthur Sheekman (additional dialogue) (Monkey Business)
SPECIAL AWARDS
Lee Garmes (Shanghai Express and Scarface) (Cinematography); C. Roy Hunter (Frankenstein) (Sound); Charles D. Hall and Kenneth Strickfaden (Frankenstein) (Art Direction-Set Decoration); Jack Pierce and Pauline Eells (Frankenstein) (Makeup); Wally Westmore (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) (Special Effects)
Monday, January 9, 2012
The Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards Redux (1930-1931)
You know, the more I think about it, the more I realize that James Cagney's performance in The Public Enemy was some sort of line in the sand as far as acting in the sound era was concerned. Before it, actors were clearly influenced by the British stage actor model—reserved, refined and decidedly upper crust. Cagney was purely American—tough, urban, fast-talking, working class. He paved the way for Edward G. Robinson, Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, and even Gary Cooper in his slow-talking, Western, but just as purely American way.PICTURE (Drama)
winner: The Public Enemy (prod. Darryl F. Zanuck)
nominees: The Big Trail (prod. Winfield R. Sheehan); The Dawn Patrol (prod. Robert North); Dracula (prod. Tod Browning and Carl Laemmle, Jr.); Morocco (prod. Hector Turnbull)
Must-See Drama: The Big Trail; The Dawn Patrol; Dracula; A Free Soul; Little Caesar; The Miracle Woman; Morocco; Night Nurse
PICTURE (Comedy/Musical)
winner: City Lights (prod. Charles Chaplin)
nominees: Animal Crackers (prod. Adolph Zukor); Bimbo's Initiation (prod. Max Fleischer); The Front Page (prod. Lewis Milestone); Min And Bill (prod. George W. Hill)
Must-See: Animal Crackers; City Lights; The Front Page
PICTURE (Foreign Language)
winner: M (prod. Seymour Nebenzal)
nominees: L'Âge d'Or (prod. Le Vicomte de Noailles); Le Million (prod. Frank Clifford); Prix de Beauté (prod. Romain Pinès); The Threepenny Opera (prod. Seymour Nebenzal)
Must-See Foreign Language Pictures: L'Âge d'Or; M; Le Million
ACTOR (Drama)
winner: James Cagney (The Public Enemy)
nominees: Gary Cooper (Morocco); Walter Huston (The Criminal Code); Bela Lugosi (Dracula); Edward G. Robinson (Little Caesar)
ACTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Charles Chaplin (City Lights)
nominees: Eddie Cantor (Whoopee!); Jackie Cooper (Skippy); René Lefèvre (Le Million); The Marx Brothers (Animal Crackers)
ACTRESS (Drama)
winner: Marlene Dietrich (Morocco)
nominees: Joan Crawford (Dance, Fools, Dance); Irene Dunne (Cimarron); Norma Shearer (A Free Soul); Barbara Stanwyck (Night Nurse)
ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Jeanette MacDonald (Monte Carlo)
nominees: Virginia Cherrill (City Lights); Ina Claire (The Royal Family Of Broadway); Marie Dressler (Min And Bill); Lya Lys (L'Âge d'Or)
DIRECTOR (Drama)
winner: Fritz Lang (M)
nominees: Tod Browning (Dracula); Howard Hawks (The Dawn Patrol and The Criminal Code); Raoul Walsh (The Big Trail); William A. Wellman (The Public Enemy)
DIRECTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Charles Chaplin (City Lights)
nominees: Luis Buñuel (L'Âge d'Or); René Clair (Le Million); Lewis Milestone (The Front Page); G.W. Pabst (The Threepenny Opera)
SUPPORTING ACTOR
winner: Peter Lorre (M)
nominees: Dwight Frye (Dracula); Clark Gable (A Free Soul); Adolphe Menjou (The Front Page); Harry Myers (City Lights)
SUPPORTING ACTRESS
winner: Joan Blondell (Sinners' Holiday, Other Men's Women and Night Nurse)
nominees: Margaret Dumont (Animal Crackers); Lotte Lenya (The Threepenny Opera); Marjorie Rambeau (Min And Bill); Sylvia Sidney (An American Tragedy)
SCREENPLAY
winner: René Clair; from a play by Georges Berr and Marcel Guillemaud (Le Million)
nominees: Morrie Ryskind; from a play by George S. Kaufman, Morrie Ryskind, Burt Kalmar and Harry Ruby (Animal Crackers); Charles Chaplin (City Lights)
SPECIAL AWARDS
René Clair (Le Million) (Special Achievement In The Use Of Sound); "Makin' Whoopee" (Whoopee!) (Best Song); Fritz Arno Wagner (M) (Cinematography)
Monday, October 31, 2011
Frankenstein
I'm out of the office for a few days, so as Halloween approaches, I'm reposting some essays about classic horror films. I'll catch up on comments early next week.
I don't think I'm going out on much of a limb here to say that Frankenstein contains more iconic images than any other movie of the era, so many, in fact, I could probably name the scenes in order and you could skip the picture altogether—grave robbing, brain stealing, thunderstorms and monster making, "It's alive," the monster's first appearance, fire, the tragic death of the little girl, the villagers with torches and pitchforks. These scenes were so well established in our collective consciousness, in fact, that more than forty years later Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder could spoof it in Young Frankenstein without having to stop and explain anything to their audience.
What movie from 1967 (which like Frankenstein in 1974 is now forty-three years in our rearview mirror) could you spoof in a full-length feature without leaving your audience scratching its collective heads—The Graduate, maybe, but what fun would that be?
The story of a young scientist who soon regrets cracking the secret of creation had its genesis in the ghost stories nineteen year old Mary Wollstonecraft, her lover and soon to be husband Percy Shelley, and the poet Lord Byron told each other while vacationing together in Switzerland. In 1818, Wollstonecraft, now Mary Shelley, turned one of these stories, a combination of a nightmare she had about a lab experiment gone awry and conversations Shelley and Byron had about the origins of life, into her first novel, Frankenstein.
"Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds," Robert Oppenheimer said to himself as he watched the first atomic bomb explode on the testing grounds of the New Mexico desert, and after the Second World War, a generations of science fiction writers made a cottage industry out of the question of whether we as human beings have the right to monkey around with things that before the advances of science had been the sole provence of God, and what moral culpability do we owe when our experiments go horribly awry—or worse, don't.
But Mary Shelley asked the question first and asked it so well that the phrase "Frankenstein's monster" has become shorthand for "unintended consequences."
The novel was an immediate sensation and spawned dozens of stage adaptations over the years. The earliest of these, Richard Peake's 1823 stageplay Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein (read it here) introduced elements such as the elaborate creation scene, the mute monster and a lab assistant named Fritz that became as much a part of Frankenstein's literary tradition as the key elements of Shelley's original novel. Peggy Webling's 1927 stage version (credited as a source in the movie's titles) telescoped the time frame of the story, eliminated the Arctic chase that bookended the novel and, in the third act, added a bride for Frankenstein's monster which became the basis of the 1935 movie sequel. (Webling also, for the first time, named the monster itself "Frankenstein" after its creator.)
The success of Webling's stageplay caught the attention of Carl Laemmle, Jr., the head of production at Universal Studios and he bought the film rights for $20,000. The head of the studio, Carl Laemmle, Sr., wasn't keen to do Frankenstein, but Junior, who had been in charge of production since 1929, was enthusiastic and given the successes of All Quiet On The Western Front and Dracula, which he had previously produced, the father was inclined to give the son free reign. It was a good decision. The cycle of Universal horror movies that had begun with Lon Chaney during the silent era and which continues even to the present day with the studio's recent remake of The Wolfman, owes much to the enormous success of Frankenstein, which proved once and for all that the horror genre was viable box office.
James Whale, fresh off his successful screen adaptation of the play Waterloo Bridge, was slated to direct. For a man who had real reservations about the horror genre, he soon became its master—arguably the greatest director of horror in movie history.
In directing Frankenstein, Whale cast his gaze both to the past and to the future, drawing the movie's look from the German Expressionism of the 1920s—for example, in the graveyard sequence that opens the film—but using sound to generate fear and in the process, inventing many of the cliches of the horror genre we now take for granted. As British film historian David Thomson pointed out recently, Tod Browning's Dracula showed the potential that sound had for generating fear—"the wind in the trees, the wolves howling in the distance ... the women screaming in their sleep ... Lugosi's forbidding welcome, 'I am Drac-u-la'"—and then Whale took the ball and ran with it, giving us thunderstorms, shrieking laboratory equipment, groaning monsters, and a screaming Mae Clarke, that combine to keep the hair standing up on the back of our necks for an hour and ten minutes.
Although he began his career as a theater director, Whale took full advantage of the oppor- tunities film presented, using any number of techniques to distance Frankenstein from its literary and stage antecedents. In addition to the memorable use of sound effects, Whale abandoned the so-called proscenium arch—that is, the now long-forgotten habit of photographing a set from only one position, as if the camera had bought a ticket in the third row of a Broadway theater, that makes early sound movies feel so stagy—moving the camera around the room to get interesting angles, indeed, actually moving the camera, rather than leaving it bolted to the floor, such as for the long tracking shot of the father carrying his drowned daughter through the village square.
Whale also broke the rules of the early cinema with the introduction of Frankenstein's fiancee Elizabeth and the secondary character Victor. In this early scene, Whale shows us a series of quick close-ups and only then cuts to an establishing shot of the room, rather than the traditional approach which would have made clear where we were, that there were people in the room, and finally providing close-ups to introduce the characters, an effective bit of editing that further distances the film from the staginess of its contemporaries.
But the most effective sequence in the movie is the build-up to the introduction of the monster.
We're so familiar now with the look of Frankenstein's creation—the flat head, the hooded eyes, the bolts in his neck—that it's easy to forget that an audience in 1931 had no clear idea what the monster would look like and the final choice, which was critical to the movie's success, could have gone in any number of directions. The 1910 silent movie version of Frankenstein, a fifteen minute short which may have been the first horror movie ever made, presented the monster as a sort of Mr. Hyde to Frankenstein's Jekyll. On stage, the creature was a shaggy hunchback. And as conceived by the film's initial star, Bela Lugosi, the monster had a featureless face and wore a bushy fright wig. (Lugosi dropped out of the project shortly after the test footage was shot. Laemmle, Jr. thought Lugosi's choice of makeup, based on the clay monster in the 1920 silent film Der Golem was ridiculous and in any event Lugosi wasn't interested in playing a mute—and in the early versions of the script, wholly unsympathetic—monster.)
The monster as we know it was a collaboration between makeup expert Jack Pierce and the English actor chosen to replace Lugosi, Boris Karloff. Depending on who you believe, Whale cast Karloff (born William Henry Pratt) either after seeing Karloff brooding over lunch at the Universal commissary or at the suggestion of Whale's companion, David Lewis, who had seen Karloff in Howard Hawks's prison drama The Criminal Code. Either way, the choice was inspired. Karloff's tall, lean build (along with some very clunky shoes) allowed the monster to loom over the rest of the cast and Karloff accentuate his already thin features by removing a bridge of molars from the right side of his mouth and then sucking in his cheek. He also suggested the heavy eyelids made of wax that gave the creature a look of dim confusion.
"We had to surmise that brain after brain had been tried in that poor skull," Karloff said, "inserted and taken out again. That is why we built up the forehead to convey the impression of demoniacal surgery. Then we found the eyes were too bright, seemed too understanding, where dumb bewilderment was so essential. So I waxed my eyes to make them heavy, half-seeing."
It took three hours every day to put the makeup on and almost as long at the end of the day to take it off.
After an elaborate creation scene (Mary Shelley had summed up the entire creation sequence in a single paragraph) which Whale felt was essential to convincing the audience of the monster's reality, he then delays Karloff's first appearance until the moment just after Frankenstein learns for the first time that he's gifted his creation with a defective "criminal" brain (which along with the opening grave robbing scene was an addition of the screenplay). As Frankenstein (Colin Clive) and his colleague Dr. Waldman (Edward van Sloan) talk, we hear the sound of heavy footsteps coming up the stair—an early example of the role sound plays in horror—the characters at last react to the approaching footsteps and we know something important is about to happen. The door to the lab opens, the monster backs into the room, then turns, and at the speed of a tripping heartbeat, a pair of axial cuts—a jump cut directly along the line from the camera toward its subject—brings us eye to eye with the monster for the first time.
Thirty-one minutes into the picture, it's one of the greatest entrances in movie history, up there with that dolly shot that zooms in on John Wayne in 1939's Stagecoach.
Audiences of the time were completely sold. Frankenstein premiered on November 21, 1931, and immediately set box office records. Shot in thirty-five days at a cost of $291,000, Frankenstein grossed over $5 million in its initial run, despite hitting theaters at the depths of the Depression. The critical reception was just as enthusiastic and the movie made the New York Times top ten list for the year.
"Whale and I both saw the character of the monster as an innocent one," Karloff later said. "This was a pathetic creature who, like us all, had neither the wish nor the say in his creation, and certainly did not wish upon itself the hideous image which automatically terrified humans whom it tried to befriend."
And therein lies the lasting appeal of Mary Shelley's story, I think, and why we feel such empathy for the monster, because it dares to ask the question "Why, oh Lord, did you make us, as Frankenstein did his monster, so poor, so ugly and so ill-equipped to face a world that is so unforgiving of all but the rich, the beautiful and the talented?" It's a question many of us ask on a daily basis.
I've been re-reading Mary Shelley recently, and I think she was asking, albeit surreptitiously, a question even more fundamental than that of what duty scientists owe humanity, which is to say, What duty does the creator, i.e., God, owe his creation, us. That's a question religion doesn't usually ask; religions primarily concern themselves with the duties a man owes his god. To even ask the question the other way around (forget trying to formulate an answer) would have for centuries been to invite the stake as the penalty for blasphemy, and even in the nineteenth century such speculation meant financial ruin and social exile—afterall, Mary's own husband, Percy Shelley, was expelled from Oxford and became estranged from his family for touting atheism.
So I ask you, what duty does the creator owe his creation? Because let's face it, if I neglected my dog, say, the way God has neglected the earth, the SPCA would be on me so fast my head would swim.
But I digress.
Frankenstein was a huge hit but, of course, received no Oscar nominations. Admittedly, there were few technical awards in those days—no awards for special effects, costumes or makeup— but it was overlooked even in the categories of sound and set decoration, never mind screenplay, acting, directing and best picture.
And now for what I suspect is a key question for many: will Frankenstein scare you? Probably not, to be honest, but then again that depends on what scares you. I happened to catch a goodly chunk of some cable network's Saw marathon a few weekends ago (while Katie-Bar-The-Door was working ungodly hours keeping America safe for democracy) and to be honest with you, I wasn't just not scared, I was bored most of the time. For me, anyway, a good horror movie has to do more than simply test your gag reflex or your autonomic reactions to cats-jumping-out-of-closets kind of shocks, otherwise you might as well head on over to the supermarket and watch the butcher chop meat. Frankenstein is stylish, exciting, has a few genuinely disturbing moments, such as when the monster accidentally kills the little girl, and raises some fundamental questions about our role in the universe. For me, that's just about all I could ever want out of a horror movie—or any other kind of movie, for that matter.
Frankenstein is a fundamental building block, not just of movie literacy but of cultural literacy. Its look, its feel, its conventions and its concepts have so permeated the bedrock that even if you've never seen the 1931 version of Frankenstein, you've drunk from its well.
I say, time to drink from the source.
I don't think I'm going out on much of a limb here to say that Frankenstein contains more iconic images than any other movie of the era, so many, in fact, I could probably name the scenes in order and you could skip the picture altogether—grave robbing, brain stealing, thunderstorms and monster making, "It's alive," the monster's first appearance, fire, the tragic death of the little girl, the villagers with torches and pitchforks. These scenes were so well established in our collective consciousness, in fact, that more than forty years later Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder could spoof it in Young Frankenstein without having to stop and explain anything to their audience.What movie from 1967 (which like Frankenstein in 1974 is now forty-three years in our rearview mirror) could you spoof in a full-length feature without leaving your audience scratching its collective heads—The Graduate, maybe, but what fun would that be?
The story of a young scientist who soon regrets cracking the secret of creation had its genesis in the ghost stories nineteen year old Mary Wollstonecraft, her lover and soon to be husband Percy Shelley, and the poet Lord Byron told each other while vacationing together in Switzerland. In 1818, Wollstonecraft, now Mary Shelley, turned one of these stories, a combination of a nightmare she had about a lab experiment gone awry and conversations Shelley and Byron had about the origins of life, into her first novel, Frankenstein."Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds," Robert Oppenheimer said to himself as he watched the first atomic bomb explode on the testing grounds of the New Mexico desert, and after the Second World War, a generations of science fiction writers made a cottage industry out of the question of whether we as human beings have the right to monkey around with things that before the advances of science had been the sole provence of God, and what moral culpability do we owe when our experiments go horribly awry—or worse, don't.
But Mary Shelley asked the question first and asked it so well that the phrase "Frankenstein's monster" has become shorthand for "unintended consequences."
The novel was an immediate sensation and spawned dozens of stage adaptations over the years. The earliest of these, Richard Peake's 1823 stageplay Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein (read it here) introduced elements such as the elaborate creation scene, the mute monster and a lab assistant named Fritz that became as much a part of Frankenstein's literary tradition as the key elements of Shelley's original novel. Peggy Webling's 1927 stage version (credited as a source in the movie's titles) telescoped the time frame of the story, eliminated the Arctic chase that bookended the novel and, in the third act, added a bride for Frankenstein's monster which became the basis of the 1935 movie sequel. (Webling also, for the first time, named the monster itself "Frankenstein" after its creator.)The success of Webling's stageplay caught the attention of Carl Laemmle, Jr., the head of production at Universal Studios and he bought the film rights for $20,000. The head of the studio, Carl Laemmle, Sr., wasn't keen to do Frankenstein, but Junior, who had been in charge of production since 1929, was enthusiastic and given the successes of All Quiet On The Western Front and Dracula, which he had previously produced, the father was inclined to give the son free reign. It was a good decision. The cycle of Universal horror movies that had begun with Lon Chaney during the silent era and which continues even to the present day with the studio's recent remake of The Wolfman, owes much to the enormous success of Frankenstein, which proved once and for all that the horror genre was viable box office.
James Whale, fresh off his successful screen adaptation of the play Waterloo Bridge, was slated to direct. For a man who had real reservations about the horror genre, he soon became its master—arguably the greatest director of horror in movie history.
In directing Frankenstein, Whale cast his gaze both to the past and to the future, drawing the movie's look from the German Expressionism of the 1920s—for example, in the graveyard sequence that opens the film—but using sound to generate fear and in the process, inventing many of the cliches of the horror genre we now take for granted. As British film historian David Thomson pointed out recently, Tod Browning's Dracula showed the potential that sound had for generating fear—"the wind in the trees, the wolves howling in the distance ... the women screaming in their sleep ... Lugosi's forbidding welcome, 'I am Drac-u-la'"—and then Whale took the ball and ran with it, giving us thunderstorms, shrieking laboratory equipment, groaning monsters, and a screaming Mae Clarke, that combine to keep the hair standing up on the back of our necks for an hour and ten minutes.
Although he began his career as a theater director, Whale took full advantage of the oppor- tunities film presented, using any number of techniques to distance Frankenstein from its literary and stage antecedents. In addition to the memorable use of sound effects, Whale abandoned the so-called proscenium arch—that is, the now long-forgotten habit of photographing a set from only one position, as if the camera had bought a ticket in the third row of a Broadway theater, that makes early sound movies feel so stagy—moving the camera around the room to get interesting angles, indeed, actually moving the camera, rather than leaving it bolted to the floor, such as for the long tracking shot of the father carrying his drowned daughter through the village square.Whale also broke the rules of the early cinema with the introduction of Frankenstein's fiancee Elizabeth and the secondary character Victor. In this early scene, Whale shows us a series of quick close-ups and only then cuts to an establishing shot of the room, rather than the traditional approach which would have made clear where we were, that there were people in the room, and finally providing close-ups to introduce the characters, an effective bit of editing that further distances the film from the staginess of its contemporaries.
But the most effective sequence in the movie is the build-up to the introduction of the monster.
We're so familiar now with the look of Frankenstein's creation—the flat head, the hooded eyes, the bolts in his neck—that it's easy to forget that an audience in 1931 had no clear idea what the monster would look like and the final choice, which was critical to the movie's success, could have gone in any number of directions. The 1910 silent movie version of Frankenstein, a fifteen minute short which may have been the first horror movie ever made, presented the monster as a sort of Mr. Hyde to Frankenstein's Jekyll. On stage, the creature was a shaggy hunchback. And as conceived by the film's initial star, Bela Lugosi, the monster had a featureless face and wore a bushy fright wig. (Lugosi dropped out of the project shortly after the test footage was shot. Laemmle, Jr. thought Lugosi's choice of makeup, based on the clay monster in the 1920 silent film Der Golem was ridiculous and in any event Lugosi wasn't interested in playing a mute—and in the early versions of the script, wholly unsympathetic—monster.)The monster as we know it was a collaboration between makeup expert Jack Pierce and the English actor chosen to replace Lugosi, Boris Karloff. Depending on who you believe, Whale cast Karloff (born William Henry Pratt) either after seeing Karloff brooding over lunch at the Universal commissary or at the suggestion of Whale's companion, David Lewis, who had seen Karloff in Howard Hawks's prison drama The Criminal Code. Either way, the choice was inspired. Karloff's tall, lean build (along with some very clunky shoes) allowed the monster to loom over the rest of the cast and Karloff accentuate his already thin features by removing a bridge of molars from the right side of his mouth and then sucking in his cheek. He also suggested the heavy eyelids made of wax that gave the creature a look of dim confusion.
"We had to surmise that brain after brain had been tried in that poor skull," Karloff said, "inserted and taken out again. That is why we built up the forehead to convey the impression of demoniacal surgery. Then we found the eyes were too bright, seemed too understanding, where dumb bewilderment was so essential. So I waxed my eyes to make them heavy, half-seeing."It took three hours every day to put the makeup on and almost as long at the end of the day to take it off.
After an elaborate creation scene (Mary Shelley had summed up the entire creation sequence in a single paragraph) which Whale felt was essential to convincing the audience of the monster's reality, he then delays Karloff's first appearance until the moment just after Frankenstein learns for the first time that he's gifted his creation with a defective "criminal" brain (which along with the opening grave robbing scene was an addition of the screenplay). As Frankenstein (Colin Clive) and his colleague Dr. Waldman (Edward van Sloan) talk, we hear the sound of heavy footsteps coming up the stair—an early example of the role sound plays in horror—the characters at last react to the approaching footsteps and we know something important is about to happen. The door to the lab opens, the monster backs into the room, then turns, and at the speed of a tripping heartbeat, a pair of axial cuts—a jump cut directly along the line from the camera toward its subject—brings us eye to eye with the monster for the first time.
Thirty-one minutes into the picture, it's one of the greatest entrances in movie history, up there with that dolly shot that zooms in on John Wayne in 1939's Stagecoach.
Audiences of the time were completely sold. Frankenstein premiered on November 21, 1931, and immediately set box office records. Shot in thirty-five days at a cost of $291,000, Frankenstein grossed over $5 million in its initial run, despite hitting theaters at the depths of the Depression. The critical reception was just as enthusiastic and the movie made the New York Times top ten list for the year.
"Whale and I both saw the character of the monster as an innocent one," Karloff later said. "This was a pathetic creature who, like us all, had neither the wish nor the say in his creation, and certainly did not wish upon itself the hideous image which automatically terrified humans whom it tried to befriend."
And therein lies the lasting appeal of Mary Shelley's story, I think, and why we feel such empathy for the monster, because it dares to ask the question "Why, oh Lord, did you make us, as Frankenstein did his monster, so poor, so ugly and so ill-equipped to face a world that is so unforgiving of all but the rich, the beautiful and the talented?" It's a question many of us ask on a daily basis.I've been re-reading Mary Shelley recently, and I think she was asking, albeit surreptitiously, a question even more fundamental than that of what duty scientists owe humanity, which is to say, What duty does the creator, i.e., God, owe his creation, us. That's a question religion doesn't usually ask; religions primarily concern themselves with the duties a man owes his god. To even ask the question the other way around (forget trying to formulate an answer) would have for centuries been to invite the stake as the penalty for blasphemy, and even in the nineteenth century such speculation meant financial ruin and social exile—afterall, Mary's own husband, Percy Shelley, was expelled from Oxford and became estranged from his family for touting atheism.
So I ask you, what duty does the creator owe his creation? Because let's face it, if I neglected my dog, say, the way God has neglected the earth, the SPCA would be on me so fast my head would swim.But I digress.
Frankenstein was a huge hit but, of course, received no Oscar nominations. Admittedly, there were few technical awards in those days—no awards for special effects, costumes or makeup— but it was overlooked even in the categories of sound and set decoration, never mind screenplay, acting, directing and best picture.
And now for what I suspect is a key question for many: will Frankenstein scare you? Probably not, to be honest, but then again that depends on what scares you. I happened to catch a goodly chunk of some cable network's Saw marathon a few weekends ago (while Katie-Bar-The-Door was working ungodly hours keeping America safe for democracy) and to be honest with you, I wasn't just not scared, I was bored most of the time. For me, anyway, a good horror movie has to do more than simply test your gag reflex or your autonomic reactions to cats-jumping-out-of-closets kind of shocks, otherwise you might as well head on over to the supermarket and watch the butcher chop meat. Frankenstein is stylish, exciting, has a few genuinely disturbing moments, such as when the monster accidentally kills the little girl, and raises some fundamental questions about our role in the universe. For me, that's just about all I could ever want out of a horror movie—or any other kind of movie, for that matter.
Frankenstein is a fundamental building block, not just of movie literacy but of cultural literacy. Its look, its feel, its conventions and its concepts have so permeated the bedrock that even if you've never seen the 1931 version of Frankenstein, you've drunk from its well.I say, time to drink from the source.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
