Quips and Quotations (Something Welcome This Way Comes Edition)

 

The monsters weren't intended to be gay, except possibly when director James Whale was behind the lens, but they read as gay to me. For me and my fellow queer youth growing up in the gay-intolerant era of the mid-twentieth century, these monsters spoke to our lives. That they flourished in marvelous gothic fantasy films, some brillant, most ridiculous, all imagination-stirring, only made them more special.

Hollywood's message may have seemed clear: You're gay; you're a monster. The villagers must hunt you down and destroy you. However, there was a more subversive underside to them. Almost without exception the monsters are presented sympathetically: Frankenstein's Monster was a lonely innocent, persecuted for existing, and good with children (some of the time). And there was his enormous schvancestucker. The Wolfman was a heroic fellow who acquired a cursed life when he came to the aid of a damsel in distress. Even soulless Dracula is often presented as a lonely, isolated figure seeking love, burdened by a curse acquired in defense of his country. The villagers are usually frightened, ignorant yahoos, with a hair-trigger lynch-mob response to almost any stimulus.

These movies said to me, It is intolerant society that is wrong. Hang in there. Fight the good fight. If you get enough sequels, eventually everyone will love you. Once Abbott and Costello show up, you're home free.

There is hope.

--Douglas McEwan, The Q Guide to Classic Monster Movies

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1944-2024

The "enourmous schvancestucker," that Mr. McEwan refers to is not a direct or even an indirect quote from any classic monster movie made in the 1930s or '40s, but rather uttered by the winsome young woman pictured above in a classic monster comedy from the 1970s. Her name is Teri Garr, and as a trick instead of a treat I'll leave it up to you to come up with the name of that movie.

Smart Art (Ben Day, Done Dat Edition)

 

 

This Halloween, why not let Roy Lichtenstein pick out your costume?

Vital Viewing (Hex and Violence Edition)

 

Halloween is not too far off, and what better symbol of the holiday than a witch? Here's one of cinema's scariest. If fact, she just might be the gold (or mold) standard for cinematic scary witches:

Did you notice how the Tin Man put out the fire with his oil can hat? That's because a fire needs oxygen or else it's likely to die out. Nice to know that even in a land of witches and talking scarecrows, the basic laws of science still apply. 

By the time she died at age 82 in 1985, Cleveland native Margaret Hamilton had lived through decades of TV showings of 1939's The Wizard of Oz, and was well-aware that her Wicked Witch of the West character had become a cultural icon. It didn't seem to bother her any. Also, cultural icons often attract the attention of other cultural icons, which seems to be the case in this clip that pairs Hamilton with a man who was considered anything but wicked: 

  

Mister Rogers seems positively gleeful at the prospect of this sweet old lady transforming herself into a wicked witch. Walk on the wild side, Fred!

Mister Rogers' Neighborhood wasn't the only 1970s TV instance of Margaret Hamilton donning the pointy black hat and the rest of the black ensemble. Here she is alongside a man with a wit so wicked it could have turned Dorothy's face as red as her ruby slippers:

Nice place for the clip to end, huh? I take what YouTube gives me, folks. I did see this special when I was in high school, but I've long since forgotten what kind of truck driver Paul Lynde turned into. Since I don't want you to feel deprived, let's just say this came next:

Betty White, bless her soul, got her wish.  

..............................................................................................................................................

 Now, let's look at a different witch. Well, I thought she was a witch at first because there's a black cat, and the lady herself is dressed in black, but that's where the similarity ends:

And I don't care if she's a witch or not. She's still magical.

Mitzi Gaynor 1931-2024

Awesome Audio (All's Wells That Ends Welles Edition)

 

Huh? As if things weren't bad enough in the Ukraine and the Middle East, now we have to worry about the Thames Valley as well?

Now we're getting somewhere. First published in serialized form in a pair of U.K. and U.S. magazines in 1887, and then as a hardcovered novel in 1888, Wells' tale of an extraterrestrial invasion of England, if it didn't invent (there were earlier examples here and there) then certainly popularized the idea that there were races of beings on other planets, and it was only a matter of time before we'd find them or they'd find us. And no matter who found who, we Earthlings better be careful, because it went without saying (for no other reason than Wells had so convincingly said it first) that the otherworldly peeps resided in a much more technologically advanced society than our own. Now, why exactly should that be? Why couldn't Mars or any other planet have little green hunter-gatherers? Wells never said, but some scholars have theorized that, despite War of the Worlds straight-faced prose, his intent may have been satirical. In other words, Wells wanted to take us humans down a notch or two, probably figuring we had gotten pretty cocky in the last few decades of the Victorian era as the technology of this planet was becoming increasingly advanced, what with such inventions as Edison's light bulb, Bell's telephone, and...  

...Marconi's radio. Now, the above photo is not from the Victorian era, as attested by that young woman's hemline. It just that from the time something is invented, 1901 in the case of radio, to the time it becomes commonplace may take a while. By the 1930s, radio had become commonplace, the internet of its era. And like the internet, content sometimes went viral. 

 

Which brings us to this fellow. A Midwestern child prodigy whose father made a fortune inventing a bicycle lamp, Orson Welles had become a leading light of Broadway and the Manhattan theatrical scene as a whole when he was barely out of his teens, first as an actor and then increasingly as a writer, director, and producer. In 1937, Welles and fellow Federal Theatre Project director John Houseman founded their own repertory company The Mercury Theatre, the success of which attracted the attention of the Columbia Broadcast System. At the age of 23 Welles was already a relatively old hand at radio, having played the title character on the popular series The Shadow, when CBS asked him and Houseman to come up with something, which turned out to be Mercury Theatre of the Air. The format was that every week would be a radio adaptation of a well-known literary work--Treasure Island, The Count of Monte Cristo, etc.--with Welles playing the lead. Some months into doing this show, Welles got an idea. Along with The Shadow, he had also done quite of bit of acting on the popular program The March of Time, which often depicted historical events in the form of a radio news broadcast. Why not do the same thing with a classic work of fiction? The War of the Worlds was chosen, its setting changed and updated from Victorian England to New Deal USA. 

Airing on the day before Halloween on October 30, 1938, what listeners would have heard first was the announcer welcoming you to another edition of Mercury Theatre on the Air and that this week's episode would be a dramatization of the H.G. Wells classic. This was followed by Orson Welles himself reading an updated version of the first few paragraphs of the Wells novel, which then gives way to "Ricky Ricardo Ramon Raquello and His Orchestra" supposedly broadcast live from a NYC hotel. Unfortunately for poor Mr. Raquello, his orchestrations kept getting interrupted by breaking news reports of objects falling from the sky. Here's one such interruption: 

After that news reports start coming fast and furious and regular broadcasting is permanently preempted for the night and maybe forever as the seriousness of the threat to the nation soon becomes clear. And I do mean soon. According to Houseman: "Our actual broadcasting time, from the first mention of the meteorites to the fall of New York City, was less than forty minutes. During that time, men travelled long distances, large bodies of troops were mobilized, cabinet meetings were held, savage battles fought on land and in the air. And millions of people accepted it—emotionally if not logically." As civilization falls, so too does the "Inter-Continental Radio News." The last thing one hears before the station break, the real station break, is a lone ham radio operator asking if anyone is out there. After the commercial, and another reminder from the announcer that this is just fiction, the final twenty minutes of the play reverts back to Orson Welles' first-person narration, as his character wanders the ruins of civilization, encountering a right-wing whack job along the way, in much the same way as the novel's narrator did, albeit this time in a much more abbreviated fashion. The story ends relatively happily when Welles character, as did his counterpart in the novel, discovers all the Martians have dropped dead (I'll get to why in a moment.) At this point, Welles the survivor of an apocalypse gives way to Welles the radio personality as he cheerfully delivers his goodbyes for the night:

Then all hell broke loose:

Really? The entire nation panicked? Well, that's what everyone thought at the time...until you try and find the person willing to go on record and admit that they panicked. It's always the other fellow who think it's real, while you know better. Actually, more people that night were listening to radio ventriloquist Edgar Bergan (just try and catch him moving his lips) and knew nothing of it...until they read the next day's papers. Still the idea that there was a mass panic must have come from somewhere. Academics far and wide have spent the last 85 years trying to answer that question. The consensus seems to be that in every major radio market the broadcast aired, there were a few people here and there who took it to be real, of maybe merely wondered if it was real, and called up their local police department, their local fire department, and most significantly, their local newspaper, to find out just what the hell was going on. So it made headlines, the newsworthiness of the event, some have alleged, exacerbated by the fact that print media had been losing advertising revenue to the radio upstart. Payback time may have been a motive on the part of the press. As stories of people committing suicide rather than be captives of the Martians swirled about, Orson Welles himself thought at first it was end of his career. Both the suicides and end of his career proved to be false. Already a public figure, Welles became even more of a public figure. A star in fact. Hollywood came calling. He produced, directed, co-wrote and starred in a major motion picture, Citizen Kane, the theme of which was...

...media manipulation.

As for H.G. Wells, he was still alive during all of this. Three years after the radio broadcast, Wells and Welles finally met, in San Antonio, Texas. Orson was there for a town hall meeting, and H.G. to address a gathering of the United States Brewers Association (science fiction and alcohol--both has its effects on the imagination.) Here they both are on--where else?--the radio:

H.G. Wells died at the age of 79 in 1946, by which time atomic bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. War of the Worlds minus the Martians. As for Orson Welles, his next movie after Citizen Kane was The Magnificent Ambersons. He produced, directed, wrote, and, though not seen on screen this time around, provided his signature narration. At least he did all those things until the film was taken out of his hands by an impatient RKO. From then on in the word "sporadic" best describes the rest of Welles' career. To be sure there were acting-directing highs, such as The Lady from Shanghai and A Touch of Evil. Solely as an actor, he turned in a memorable performance as the likably unscrupulousness Harry Lime in The Third Man. But Welles just couldn't abide the studio system, even as a combination of antitrust rulings and television was gradually tearing that system apart. During the 1960s and '70, Welles' self-directed movies were independent productions. I've seen a few of these and they certainly held my attention, but such arty fare as an adaptation of Franz Kafka's The Trial or the Shakespearean amalgamation Chimes at Midnight, in which Welles played Falstaff, were hardly commercial crowd-pleasers. And these films could be few and far between as Welles was aways scrambling to find someone to financially back them. That's when he wasn't scrambling to pay back the IRS, a not uncommon celebrity chore. An endless appetite for food and drink led to enormous weight gain, though facially at least a certain handsomeness always remained. As did his sense of humor. The final decade-and-half of his life saw him involved with such disparate undertakings as narrating a Bugs Bunny documentary; appearances on the Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts, where he once hilariously upbraided Dino for his debauched lifestyle; Paul Masson commercials ("we will sell no wine before its time"); guesting on, and even guest-hosting, Johhny Carson's and Merv Griffin's talk shows; a cameo in a Muppets movie; a bravura performance as an exasperated judge in Butterfly, the film that made Pia Zadora, however briefly, a household name; and the very last time his distinctive voice was ever heard on film, in this case film animation, as Unicron in The Transformers: The Movie. The man who had once so memorably manipulated the media in the end was manipulated by the media himself, which he seemed to find amusing. Orson Welles died in 1985 at the age of 70.

Now I'd like to return briefly to War of the Worlds. Remember me telling you the Martians were all dead at the story's conclusion? So how did they die? Infectious diseases. The extraterrestrial's immune systems couldn't handle all the pathogens found here on Earth.

This past July Congress held hearings on the question of Unidentified Flying Objects, or UFOs for short. While NASA officials conceded they could not identify many of these flying objects, there was no reason to believe they were visitors from another planet. Well, that's one denial that went over like a lead weather balloon. If anything, it increased suspicions that this world is being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than ours.  And if so, how do we know their intentions are benign? That they won't stir up as much trouble as the extraterrestrials did in H.G. Wells' novel? What can we do to stop them?

 Maybe this fellow can persuade the outer space invaders not to take their shots. After all, he and his ilk have already convinced enough earthbound humans not to.  

 

Preschool Confidential

 

You think this guy is scary? Aw, come on, he's got nothing on...

...THE KILLER!

I wrote about Jerry Lee Lewis (1935-2022) here.

Quips and Quotations (Haunted Wanted Edition)

 

Why are people afraid of ghosts? "Ooh, no, I wouldn’t want to see one! I’d be too scared"– accompanied by a tremolo of fear in the voice – is the common reaction. This puzzles me. I’d think anyone would welcome the opportunity. I’ve never heard of a ghost hurting anybody.

--Dick Cavett

Where other people see monsters, I guess I see hope.

--Fox Mulder

Mulder doesn't believe outright. He wants to believe. That sums up Mulder for me.

--Chris Carter, creator and producer of The X-Files.

Sherman Duffy of the New York Herald once said, a newspaperman is the loneliest guy on earth. Socially he ranks somewhere between a hooker and a bartender. Spiritually he stands with Galileo, because he knows the world is round...

...not that it matters much when his editor knows it's flat.

--Carl Kolchak, hero of the 1972 made-for TV movie The Night Stalker, from which was spun off the regrettably short-lived series Kolchak: The Night Stalker.

 

Fashion Icon

Halloween, 1962: What exactly are we looking at here? A phantom? The Grim Reaper? The Cuban Missile Crises had ended just a few days earlier, so maybe it's some kind of radiation suit, one that comes in basic black. Actually, it's none of those things. According to multiple sources, it's someone dressed as a...

 ...garment bag. You know what a garment bag is. It has a zipper and a hanger, and when you go traveling, it's what you might put a suit or nice dress in so it's less likely to get dirty or wrinkled. I don't know if it works all that well when there's a human being inside, but it's this particular individual's Halloween costume. If nothing else, it's original.

Or maybe not so original, because in this color picture, someone else decided to dress up as a garment bag, though this one was red. The two children in-between the garment bags have relatively more conventional Halloween costumes. The little boy appears to be a skeleton, and the little girl a witch. Anything else to say about this picture? Well, it's a very elegant-looking bedroom.

 Here they are again in the, um...living room? Dining room, maybe? With all that fancy furniture, it's certainly not a rec room.

 Here they are walking down what appears to be a rather large hallway, or a humongous foyer. Look at those big windows. I bet it takes a lot of Windex keeping them clean.

OK, I've kept you in suspense long enough. Let me tell you who these folks are. I'll start with the red garment bag:

It's Jean Kennedy Smith, sister of...

...the then-President of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. And the black garment bag? According to multiple sources (including the JFK Library) it's...

...none other than First Lady Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy (I wonder if Oleg Cassini designed her costume.)

As for the two children, the little boy skeleton is Steve Smith Jr., Jean's son, and the little girl witch is Carolyn, the President's and First Lady's daughter. Carolyn's brother John-John may have been too young for Halloween at that point.

However, a year later (again, according to the JFK library), John-John did indeed get into the act (looks like some recycled costuming here.)

It's nice to know Jack and Jackie weren't above having a little fun during their short stay at the White House, but the joke may have been on them, because all these years later...

...they've become Halloween costumes themselves.

Max Fear Factor

 

Yes, the above picture is that of a fly reading what appears to be Forbes while being groomed by a middle-aged man in glasses. Look carefully, or even haphazardly, and you'll see what appears to be a human hand holding up the back of the magazine, which has an ad for what I'm guessing is the Sheraton hotel chain. So it's not really a fly at all, but an actual human, an actor by the name of David Hedison. In the 1958 film The Fly, Hedison played a scientist named Andre Delambre who invents a machine that can transfer matter across space, sort of like the transporter on Star Trek, though it would be another eight years before that show's debut. Unlike Captain Kirk, Dr. Delambre doesn't want to beam himself from the Starship Enterprise to a planet down below. He's perfectly content, and reasonably believes it would be a big enough scientific achievement, to go from one side of his basement to the other. Unfortunately, when he steps into the chamber, he doesn't notice the housefly inside. The machine switches on, atoms scramble, and man and fly end up with each other's head and arm/leg. On the plus side, they do make it to the other side of the basement.

 

Here's another picture:

 

The bare-chested flat-headed fellow in the middle is actor Boris Karloff. Obviously, he was never in the running to play Tarzan. No, he portrayed the title character in the 1931 film Frankenstein. Wait, that's not right. An actor by the name of Colin Clive played that particular role. The confusion is understandable. Even Universal Pictures sometimes got it wrong, such as when they came out with Abbott and Costello Meets Frankenstein in 1948. Bud and Lou met no such person. They did meet, or at least ran in the opposite direction of, a monster played by Glenn Strange. But Karloff portrayed that monster first, and best. In the 1931 film, Clive/Frankenstein is intent on creating life in the laboratory, as if the planet wasn't overpopulated enough all ready. Maybe the idea was to help childless couples.  Anyway, the result is Karloff. As you can see, he has a face only a mad scientist could love.

No, this fellow's not the Batman villain Two-Face. It's actor Lon Chaney, who played the title character in the 1925 film Phantom of the Opera. What exactly is a phantom doing at the opera, you may ask? Turns out he's a frustrated producer. When his favorite actress doesn't get the lead, he goes into a snit and drops a chandelier on the audience. I do hope the survivors got their tickets refunded.

 

 

The fellow getting groomed this time is the Phantom's son, Lon Chaney Jr. He actually came into the world as Creighton Chaney, but changed his first name once he realised identification with his father could get him acting jobs. One of those jobs was the title character in 1941's The Wolf Man. He starts out the film as a very human Larry Talbot, and turns into a monster only after being bitten by a wolf. He should be grateful he didn't get rabies.

 

 

If you're not quite sure whom that gruesome fellow in middle is, first imagine him wearing a fedora. You can't see his hands, but if you could you would, or should, see switchblades in lieu of fingers. Yep, it's none other than Freddy Kreuger, aka actor Robert Englund, of The Nightmare on Elm Street movies. In the first film of this long-running series, Freddy terrorizes teenagers in their dreams until he finally kills them, and they wake up dead. Or rather they don't wake up. He does this seven times from 1984 to 2003. Why? Originally to seek revenge. He was burned to death by a bunch of vigilante suburbanites, and now he's going after their kids. Why was he burned alive? He murdered a bunch of kids. And why did he do that? As Peter Boyle told another serial killer in an episode of The X-Files, because he's a homicidal maniac. So basically Freddy goes from being a homicidal maniac in life to a vengeful homicidal maniac in death. As the series progresses, he puts revenge behind him and goes back to being a homicidal maniac without any personal bias attached. He eventually goes after the real-life actors who played the characters in the first movie, but only kills the fictional people they encounter, proving that, in this series at least, being make-believe can be hazardous to your health. Finally, he has a turf war with Jason Voorhees, of Friday the 13th fame. I, for one, don't blame Jason for moving to the suburbs. There's a lot more kids there to kill then you're gonna find at some abandoned summer camp.

 

What the above pictures all have in common is that none of them are from the actual movies I describe. Rather, they're behind-the-scenes photos of the actors in the process of being turned into hideous beings so they can appear in those movies. None of these thespians were hideous in real life. Mostly, they were average-looking, except Hedison, who had screen idol looks (though the Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea co-star had to contend with a much smaller screen as time went on.)

 

The man responsible for Karloff's and Chaney Jr's hideousness was long-time Universal make up department head Jack Pierce. That's him to the left of Karloff in the Frankenstein photo (sorry, don't know who the other fellow is) and he's holding up the scissors in the Wolf Man picture (when I see that I'm reminded of the Bill Cosby routine about a werewolf getting a haircut "Just a little off the knee.") Ben Nye is the guy hiding all human traces of David Hedison, except the one hand. Nye later founded his own make up line. David B. Miller did Englund's makeup in the first Nightmare, but that's Bill Terezakis and an assistant applying the scars for a later film.  As for Lon Chaney Sr, he did his own transformations, and is proudly displaying his makeup case in that photo.

 

Suppose you saw one of those monsters in real life? What would you do? Run? I wouldn't blame you, but how far would you run until it occurred to you that maybe that really wasn't a monster you saw? After all, everytime you see a film where the monster's a  monster solely through the art of make up, it's evidence that someone who's NOT a monster can LOOK like a monster. Thus, once you're safely in your house, your basement, with the doors to both locked and bolted, and you're hidden under the pool table, then would probably be a good time to say to yourself, "Hey, I bet that was an actor. I should have got his autograph!"

 

Of course, all actors dressed up like monsters aren't necessary worthy of an autograph. Halloween's almost upon us, and all those "haunted houses" run by the Jaycees and whoever are open for the season. We don't think of the people who work in such places--often high school or college kids--as being actors, but that's what they are, even if they don't belong to Equity. Just like Karloff and Englund, they, too, have transformed themselves into creatures of the night via make up. Or rubber masks if they're lazy. I try not to judge. It can't be easy squeezing horror in between homework.

 

 

 Certainly people do get scared when they go to those places. But I wonder, are the scariest haunted houses the ones where actors have the most convincing makeup, or masks? I once went to one where someone dressed like a--well, I'm not sure what exactly, but it was scary enough. Except I knew it wasn't real. I was in one end of the room, and the goblin or ghoul or whatever was in the other. He (or she; couldn't tell) came up to me and went AAARRRRGGGHHH!!!! and then followed me out of the room, down a hallway, and right out of the haunted house, AAARRRRGGGHHHING all the way! I'm like, dude, I get your point already. But the make up was convincing.

 

 

Unlike real haunted houses, assuming there are such things, fake haunted houses operate under a tremendous disadvantage. People who willingly go to one know, as I did, that it's fake. If they didn't, they probably wouldn't go. I mean, if it's a real haunted house, the monster kills you, right? What's the fun in that? Yet the paying customers do want to be scared, but just safe and secure in the knowledge that no physical harm will befall them. Frankly, it's a rather contradictory thing to want, but I suppose some psychological theory about getting your catharsis off can explain it. Except make up (or a mask) no matter how good, isn't going to do the trick by itself. Instead of fear, it may just inspire a certain admiration for a job well done.

The key, I think, is the element of surprise. Not that surprise is all that easy is a situation where people are walking around snapping there fingers going, "C'mon, c'mon, it's a haunted house, I want to be surprised. Coulda gone and seen Fast and Furious 17, instead I came here." But it can be done. Just make sure their mind is somewhere else. Ever do that? I don't even mean on purpose. I mean, you know, someone's wrapped up in their own thoughts, you innocuously say "hi" or whatever, and they jump back and scream, "Oh! You frightened me!" At which point, you rush to the bathroom and check your face for acne. Fright begets fright.

If I had a haunted house, here's what I would do. I'd give everybody who walked in a Rubik's cube. Let them walk through the place trying to figure out how to solve it. When they're deep into it, then you scare them. The house wouldn't even have to look haunted. It could be brightly lit, with pictures of baby chicks on the wall. My actors would look equally unsuspecting. Instead of monsters, they'd be dressed like Jehovah Witnesses. I envision them sneaking up on unsuspecting Rubik's holders and saying things like "Have you read the latest issue of The Watchtower?" Trust me, people would jump right out of their flip-flops. And the cubes would remain unsolved.

Getting back to movie monsters, there is an exception to the anything-scary-in-a-movie-could-be-fake-in-real-life rule. Stop-motion or digital animation creatures. That can only be faked on the screen. So, if you happen to see a fifty-foot ape in a real-world setting, you have my permission to wet your undies.

All this talk about stop-motion or computer animation makes me wonder. Suppose you saw a run-of-the-mill animated figure in real life. I don't mean someone dressed up as a cartoon character, like you see at Disneyland. I mean, a hand drawn cartoon. Wouldn't have to be a monster. Could be the most benign, friendliest cartoon character in the world, yet if you saw it walking right up to you on the street,  I bet you'd be scared. I bet you'd run. Or, if you were cornered, I bet you'd reach for your crucifix.

Or your Scooby snacks.

There's one last picture I want to show you:

That's James Cagney, not an actor one normally associates with horror. In fact, he's not, strictly speaking, being made up to look like a monster. He's getting ready to play the aforementioned Lon Chaney Sr. in the 1957 biopic Man of a Thousand Faces, which raises an intriguing prospect.

 

The next time you see a monster in real life, not only could it be an actor pretending to be a monster, but also an actor pretending to be an actor pretending to be a monster!

 

Nevertheless, I suggest you approach with extreme caution.

 

If you don't, you could end up with the wrong autograph.