Reflections of the Way Life (or the Undead) Used to Be

 

 

Basil Rathbone examines Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff in this publicity still from 1939's The Son of Frankenstein. If that wasn't spooky enough, that very same year Rathbone had to contend with a Baskervilles hound!

Vital Viewing (Wicked, Wicked Ways Edition)

Swashbuckling movie star Errol Flynn was born on this day in 1909. As you can see, he was a very handsome man in the 1930s, when the above picture was taken. Alas,  he led a very debauched life offscreen (best described as liquor and Lolitas), and it eventually took a toll on his good looks. Here he is on a once-popular game show about two years before his death in 1959. He's barely recognizable, and in fact stumps the celebrity panel. See if YOU can spot him:

That's right, Number 3 was the real Errol Flynn, and you can plainly see what effect the ravages of alcohol abuse had on his physical appearance. It left him him severely underweight, which can happen when one's only nutrition comes from a rum bottle. As for his receding hairline, that--

OK! OK! Time to own up. The above clip isn't really from a once-popular 1950s games show. Rather, it's a parody of a once-popular 1950s game show (To Tell the Truth), taken from Steve Allen's once-popular 1950s variety show. Errol Flynn is actually the guy in the middle, Number 2. What I like about that clip, other than that it's funny as hell, is that it puts Flynn's barstool fall from grace in some kind of perspective. He's put on weight, he's puffy-faced, with perhaps only the faintest trace of his former handsomeness. Yet the movie star aura, the charismatic screen presence, is still there. After all, the whole point of the sketch, the punchline, is that it's absurd that anyone would ever confuse Number 3 or even Number 1 with the real Errol Flynn. And for the joke to work, you need the real Errol Flynn to provide contrast. To be sure, had it been the Flynn of the 1930s, the sketch would have been twice as funny. That it's funny anyway shows you that two years before he was felled by a heart attack, Flynn could make, if no longer high school girls hearts flutter, at least the forty-one-year-old Martha Raye fall backwards on her chair.

Speaking of Flynn of the 1930s, here he is in perhaps his most famous role, that of a medieval mugger with a social conscious:

Let's see Barney Fife do that!

Quips and Quotations (Hungarian in Hollywood Edition)

 

He always said that if he hadn't had an accent, he wouldn't have been typecast in pictures. But if he hadn't had an accent, he wouldn't have become a star by being cast as Dracula!

--Basil Rathbone