Happy Halloween!: Swing, You Sinners [1930, Fleischer Studios]

#TCM Movie: House on Haunted Hill (1959)

"Mr. Price, fate has brought us together this rainy night. I'm starting a picture in a few weeks -- The House on Haunted Hill -- it's a ghost story." (Castle. Step Right Up!: ...I'm Gonna Scare the Pants Off Of America) From that point on, Vincent Price was sold during this chance encounter at the diner near the Goldwyn Studio with director William Castle. In playing Frederick Loren, Price would receive a two picture deal along with "The Tingler" (1959).

"House on Haunted Hill" was mostly shot at Allied Artists, but exteriors were shot at Frank Lloyd Wright's Ennis House on Los Feliz. Robb White explains that the home was "built during his Egyptian period. We were not allowed in there, but the guy who owned it let us look inside. And it was a weird house - the ceilings were 22 feet high! In one room there was a closet door that was 22 feet high and two feet wide with nothing in closet to hold up clothes or anything else. The man who owned the house had furnished only one of the many rooms with a bed, a chair, a nightstand and, in the kitchen, a card table. He complained that the famous glass walls, which joined each other at the corner with only edges of the glass panes meeting, leaked when it rained and made a weird screaming noise when the wind blew. And there was nothing you could do about it! The swimming pool was three feet deep; ten feet wide; a hundred feet long; and in the middle was a statue of a horse! It was just god-damned ridiculous!" (Weaver. Science Fiction Stars and Horror Heroes)

It wouldn't be a William Castle film without a gimmick, and the gimmick in this film involved something called "Emergo." Vincent Price remembers and explains the effect on "the opening night [...] I was in a little theatre in Baltimore. In the movie, I reeled this skeleton in using a winch, and then there'd be a real skeleton in the theatre that would shoot over the audience. Well, I was in this theatre with a great many young people in it - and they panicked! and they knocked all the seats out of the theatre!" (Weaver. Attack of the Monster Movie Makers)

 

"House on Haunted Hill" will be on TCM October 31st, 1:00 AM EST/12 AM CST

#FridayShort Scrappy's Ghost Story [1935, Columbia Cartoons]

#WomanEmpowermentWednesday #MemorableSupportingActors Maria Ouspenskaya

Before appearing on the screen as Maleva the Gypsy Fortuneteller in "The Wolf Man" (1941) and "Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man" (1943), Maria Ouspenskaya already had a storied career. Ouspenskaya was born in Tula, Russia and had studied acting and singing in Moscow and Poland, respectively. It was in Moscow that she had became one of the founding members of the First Studio, the theater subset of the Moscow Art Theater where she studied under Konstantin Stanislavsky. Ouspenskaya would end up training actors at the American Laboratory Theatre in New York City and schools she herself co-founded such as the School of Dramatic Arts in New York and the Maria Ouspenskaya School of Dance in Los Angeles.

Ouspenskaya had dabbled in film in Russia, having made some silents from 1915-1929. To keep the School of Dramatic Arts open, she began to make movies for Hollywood. Her first film "Dodsworth" (1936) immediately earned her an Academy nomination playing Gregory Gaye's mother. Although with a heavy accent and superior attitude with a heavy pension for astrology, Ouspenskaya was not an easy woman to work with but had worked consecutively up until her best known role and even afterwards.

But Ouspenskaya's best contribution to Hollywood is training many actors and actresses in the Stanislavsky Method including Anne Baxter, John Garfield, and the acting teacher who would epitomize what would become The Method, Lee Strasberg. She taught Walt Disney model (best known for dancing for "Snow White") Marge Champion. Ouspenskaya died after having suffered from a stroke and allegedly severe cigarette burns having fallen asleep while smoking a cigarette.

#ManCrushMonday #MenBeingCivilBadAssesEdition Boris Karloff and the Screen Actors Guild

In 1931, Boris Karloff filed a complaint to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences after the makeup procedures he endured while filming Frankenstein. Jack Pierce had him in the makeup chair for four hours in the morning and two at the end of the day applying then taking off both the green greasepaint as well as the prosthetics. Not only was the makeup process long and arduous, Karloff also had to wear a 48 pound costume and 11 pound shoes to achieve the large and bulking look. 

The whole experience was enough to file the complaint and when the complaint wasn't taken in account, Karloff joined 8 other actors including C. Aubrey Smith, Leon Ames, Ralph Morgan, and James Gleason who would become the board of directors for what would be the birth the Screen Actors Guild in 1933. Karloff was the union's 9th member and when it was discovered that Universal had his home phone tapped, would keep a roll of dimes in his pocket in order to conduct business. His daughter, Sara, called the Screen Actors Guild "my father's proudest work."

Deathmatch: "The Mystery of the Wax Museum" (1933) vs. "House of Wax" (1953)

History

"To be sure, stories of the fantastic, the horrible, the bizarre have been told with fullest success in black and white photography. But it has always been a question in my mind whether those very stories would not have been more gripping, more realistic, if they had been photographed in color such as we have employed with such unusual success in "Mystery of the Wax Museum" (1933) and "Doctor X." (Press Book. Mystery of the Wax Museum, from the Theater Collection of the New York Public Library.) After the success of "Doctor X" (1932), Paramount purchased the Charles Belden play "The Wax Works" in early July 1932 before "Doctor X" even premiered in New York the next month.

The acquisition was not as easy than for other stage to screen film adaptations for Paramount. Without the copyright registration, the studio had already payed Belden one thousand dollars before discovering that Film Daily, a New York trade magazine, was about to option the film. Before optioning, Ralph Murphy, the co-author of the Broadway play "Black Tower," had threatened a copyright infringement suit for the similarities in stories. The only thing the two plays had in common was the use of the killer infecting their victims with embalming fluid then turning them into statues. The New York office of Warners' was quickly spooked when Rogers and his lawyers had suggested that "The Wax Works" was possibly an infringement of "Black Tower."

The west coast wasn't ready to go down with a fight, a studio attorney writing Morris Ebenstein in the New York office that "Zanuck of the studio says that we are really just going to use the title, The Wax Museum, and write a complete original story around such title, though at the same time using a few ideas of the original manuscript." With MWM nearing production, the shooting script was compared to both stageplays resulting in Ralph Lewis reporting back to Ebenstein again that "the story had not been rewritten at all" and "the studio script is almost identical with Belden's story, except for a change of scene from London to New York, and a change of dialogue from upper British to American newspaper English."" "The Wax Museum is a newspaper story and Murdered Alive is strictly a horror proposition" seemed to be the final word on the whole copyright issue. (Koszarski, Richard. Balio, Tino. Mystery of the Wax Museum (Wisconsin/Warner Bros Screenplays. 1979)

Production started in September 1932 with many of Hal B. Wallis and Henry Blanke's cast and crew from "Doctor X," Michael Curtiz helmed the film that "resurrected the principles of German expressionist film." "It is very easy, in a story like The Mystery of the Wax Museum, for instance, to overdo the use of bizarre, startling angles. That is why I used them throughout the picture sparingly, and always with a definite purpose in mind." (Press Book. Mystery of the Wax Museum, from the Theater Collection of the New York Public Library.) Brought over from "Doctor X" (1932) as well, cinematographer Ray Rennahan and set designer Anton Grot further amplified the expressionism through two-strip Technicolor. "Developed in 1920, [...] the film camera  recorded two adjacent frames simultaneously on a single strip of film, one frame filtered to capture the green color record and the other filtered to capture the red." (Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933) - Articles - TCM.com)

"Mystery of the Wax Museum" premiered in New York February 16, 1933, turning a handsome profit of $80,000 in the states although far more successful in Europe. Reviews were erratically mixed. TIME magazine considering the experiment in color as "better than the ones which most major companies tried a year or two ago" and praising the colored cinematography as "lurid and realistic [...] appropriate to mystery stories."  Mordaunt Hall of The New York Times found the film "too ghastly for comfort." "It is all very well in its way to have a mad scientist performing operations in well-told stories, but when a melodrama depends upon the glimpses of covered bodies in a morgue and the stealing of some of them by an insane modeler in wax, is going too far." Glenda Farrell and Frank McHugh's roles as comic relief were, however, praised. Variety dubbed it as "a loose and unconvincing story [and] manage[s] a fairly decent job along with Frankenstein and Dracula lines. Loose ends never quite jell but it's one of those artificial things."

Where Weimar expressionism was a heavy influence on "The Mystery of the Museum," 1953's "House of Wax" was the first of its kind in both sight and sound. United Artists had distributed "Bwana Devil" (1952) which writer-director-producer Arch Oboler had utilized 3-D on screen which required special glasses for film-goers to get the full effect and Warner Brothers wanted in on the gimmick. It was only poetic that the director, Hungarian Andre de Toth, was blind in one eye. Vincent Price remembered that "it [being] one of the great Hollywood stories. When they wanted a director for [a 3-D] film, they hired a man who couldn't see 3-D at all! Andre de Toth was a very good director, but he really was the wrong director for 3-D. He'd go to all the rushes and say, "Why is everyone so excited about this?" It didn't mean anything to him. But he made a good picture, a good thriller. He was largely responsible for the success of the picture. The 3-D tricks just happened--there weren't a lot of them. Later on, they threw everything at everybody." (House of Wax (1953) - Articles - TCM.com)

With a visual method would have also been the perfect time to utilize the sound already being used in the Mike Todd demonstration film "This is Cinerama" currently in theaters. Calling it WarnerPhonic Audio, a primitive precursor of surround sound, WarnerPhonic had a few differences than the full sweeping audio already out in New York theaters. 35 mm of fully coated magnetic film which contained the audio tracks for left, right, and center were interlocked with two dual-strip Polaroid system projectors. One strip carried a mono optical surround track and the other a mono backup track.

But the greatest innovation of the whole film was how the "House of Wax" propelled Vincent Price's career. Mostly playing supporting roles with the occasional maniac and/or aristocratic victims, Price had his hands full with this role between makeup and the rarer moments of stunt work for the actor. "I had to get to the studio every morning at 5:30 AM to put that makeup on. It took three hours to put on and it was agony, absolute agony." He also added that the film "was made with two enormous cameras photographing in a mirror, so that you could get two tracks, and because of the unwieldy camera I had to do my own stunts. They couldn't do a close-up of me and then cut to a double. The most difficult stunt was at the beginning when the fire starts in the museum, and I run under this balcony that's in flames just before it falls. I actually did that. I worked it out with a stuntman. Anything on the floor that I might trip over or slide on was moved away and we figured out a course for me to take around these burning figures so that I could get into a tiny closet when this 3,000 lbs of burning balcony fell. It was scary." (House of Wax (1953) - Articles - TCM.com)

"House of Wax" premiered in New York on April 10, 1953 at the Paramount Theater and then was released nationally on April 25th. It became the one of the biggest films of 1953, receiving $5.5 million in rentals from the American box office. Reviews were just as mixed as its predecessor if not a little more negative.  Bosley Crowther of The New York Times called it "a display of noise and nonsense as has rattled a movie screen in years, may well cause a dazed and deafened viewer, amazed and bewildered, to inquire in wonder and genuine trepidation: What hath the Warner Brothers wrought? For this mixture of antique melodrama, three dimensional photography, ghoulish sensationalism and so-called directed sound [...] raises so many serious questions of achievement and responsibility that a friend of the motion picture medium has ample reason to be baffled and concerned." Variety was more forgiving although "uneven, nonetheless gears it to the medium -- chairs flying into the audience, cancan dancers pirouetting full into the camera, the barker's pingpong ball, as a pitchman's prop, likewise shooting out at the audience, the muscular menace springing as if from the theater into the action." Vincent Price is equally lauded as "the No. 1 menace." Harrison's Reports were even more forgiving calling it "a first-class thriller of its kind" and "the best 3-D picture yet made."

From London to New York

The beginning of both films begin with disaster. The career of a wax figure artist is even further destroyed when his business partner attempts to murder him. Instead, all of his creations as well as the museum itself burns in the process and he manages to get out supposedly unscathed with the exception of his hands. Too burnt to sculpt ever again, the artist employs a deaf-mute sculptor to help with his vision as well as another assistant (1953). In MWM, Igor's staff also includes an addict and a professor whose main purpose is to link him with a bootlegger whose customer is the wrongly convicted Winton. 

In 1933, it's business as usual as Igor starts over completely from memory but in 1953, Professor Jarrod steps up with the modern times and creates a "chamber of horrors" depicting famous historical crimes as well as current events. One current event also includes the so-called suicide of his business partner who was murdered by a cloaked disfigured killer then made to look a suicide. More bodies begin to mysteriously disappear from the morgue including a beautiful young woman.

This is when the newspapers come in in MWM, soon-to-be-fired reporter Florence Dempsey needing to find a great story to keep her job. With the intent on discovering more on a model's suicide, the body was taken from the morgue. It's even more perfect that Florence's roommate, Charlotte, is also currently dating one of the staff members of the newer wax museum. Igor becomes enamored with Charlotte looking so much like his original Marie Antoinette. Officially on the hunt for the real killer, Dempsey finds herself accidentally having to save her roommate's life.

In 1953, Jarrod takes another victim who just happens to be his dead business partner's fiancee but soon a friend of hers starts poking around the museum at night. It also does not help that Jarrod finds her startlingly like his original Marie Antoinette. But during Sue's midnight hunt, she encounters Jarrod and finds herself in his clutches with very few people to save her unless the wax museum staff is not entirely faithful to their employer.

Deathmatch

A deathmatch often constitutes two films inspired or adapted from the same material, but what came from Charles Belden's "The Wax Works" exists in either or the genres of suspense and horror. "House of Wax" is clearly the horror film and is one of my personal top 10 films that I need to watch every Halloween. But in terms of the sturdiest of the two, "The Mystery of the Wax Museum" has the strongest legs and script.  The American newspaper B-storyline helps stabilize the horror against the witty humor and lightning-speed delivery between whoever is in the scene with Glenda Farrell. It also helps to have an additional perspective in attempting to solve the suspense as it continues to progress.

The look of "The Mystery of the Wax Museum" also makes it the superior film. While the main floor of the wax museum is super detailed and well lit as the stage set for a Hollywood movie is, the further down the viewer goes into the basement, the cinematography becomes progressively Weimar-inspired. In the hallways is where there's the best use of lit and shadowed angles as well as the diagonal shapes of stairs until the viewer goes further down into Igor's more secret and murderous business. It's a fascinating cinematographic choice in placing Curtiz's influences between the two worlds.

"House of Wax" packs far more the horror punch and there is no other reason than what is Vincent Price's presence. While it is his first all-out horror film, the seeds of what eventually becomes his craft is very there although it is clear Price sticks very close to the script. He is the reason that makes the whole film although the aesthetics are full of atmosphere and gloom but the supporting cast a little low-lit compared to Glenda Farrell's vivaciousness and Fay Wray's grace.

Despite the rushed and abrupt ending of "The Mystery of the Wax Museum" and its attempts to give Florence a love life outside of career appropriate for its time, it's too clear the original is technically and the better written iteration. 

House of Wax airs on TCM October 31st at 8 pm EST/7 pm CST

#TCMMovie: Isle of the Dead (1945)

"Isle of the Dead" nailed everything RKO requested of Val Lewton's B-horror unit. Production came out costing $246,000 out of the required maximum of $150,000, the most expensive out of all of his films, ran exactly 72 minutes out of the 75, and RKO's supervisors decided on a name that was inspired by Arnold Bocklin's famous painting although the working title was "Carmilla." Bocklin's painting ended up becoming the basis of both the score and set in the creation of the nameless Greek Island that is haunted by both plague and vrykolakas.

The second of the three films of the Lewton-Karloff collaboration, "Isle of the Dead" had to go on hiatus when Karloff required back surgery. This would be one of the three surgeries he had to get done with the damage done to his back while wearing the weighted Frankenstein suit even 14 years earlier. So filming was soon suspended after having just started in July 1944. During the hiatus, Rose Hobart was able to find another film to work on, but her character of Catherine had to be cut from the film completely. With Karloff out of surgery and cast and crew scattered among the movie studios, it would take time to reassemble everyone. So during that time,  Lewton and Karloff made "The Body Snatcher" (1945) until shooting began again in December 1944.

"Isle of the Dead" would premiere in New York City on September 7, 1945. Variety considered the film as "moderate b.o."

"Isle of the Dead" will be on TCM October 17, 10:45 PM EST/9:45 PM CST

#FridayShort The Skeleton Dance [1929, Silly Symphonies]

#WomanEmpowermentWednesday Glenda Farrell as Florence Dempsey in "The Mystery of the Wax Museum" (1933)

Florence Dempsey takes no shit or prisoners. Close to being fired, a story practically falls into her lap while investigating the death and posthumous disappearance of Joan Gale. The report is a monster had taken her body away. The police suspect the son of a powerful industrialist, but Dempsey thinks different especially after noticing Joan of Arc in the local wax museum has an extraordinary likeness to the dead model. She can't prove it or the monstrous figure she found in an old house where a bootlegger stores alcohol. Florence ends up "taking [her] share." With the police currently think her crazy although having the wax museum's drug addicted employee who won't talk, Dempsey is able to really get her story and saving her roommate all at the same time.

#ManCrushMonday 6 of Val Lewton's Finest Moments

Cat People (1942)

I Walked With a Zombie (1943)

The Body Snatcher (1945)

Remake This!: Werewolf of London (1935)

"Werewolf of London" (1935) was considered a flop at the box office having been released too soon after Fredric March's Academy Award winning role in "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" (1931).  Both films were far too similar despite the lycanthrophy of the latter film. "The New York Times" was underwhelmed, Frank S. Nugent going as far as to say that "the film goes about its task with commendable thoroughness, sparing no grisly detail and springing from scene to seen with even greater ease than that oft attributed to the daring young aerialist" and that "the picture still rates the attention of action-and-horror enthusiasts." The premise of the pre-Lon Chaney film would possibly be even better as a limited television series.

Jeremy Renner as Dr. Glendon

Christoph Waltz as Dr. Yogami

Vera Farmiga as Lisa Glendon

Wentworth Miller as Paul Ames

Jerome Flynn as Sir Thomas Forsythe

TCM Movie: The Phantom of the Opera (1925)

Gaston Leroux, the author of the hit mystery-horror novel Le Fantome de l'Opera had met Carl Laemmle in 1922 when the studio head was in Paris on vacation. The interaction was not entirely random. After the initial failure of "Phantom," Leroux had begun writing for the budding film industry in France and had solidified himself as a writer of all mediums by the time this chance meeting had occurred. "In an otherwise desultory conversation the American film mogul mentioned to Leroux how impressed he had been by the vast Paris Opera House [...] Leroux responded by giving Laemmle a copy of his even-by-then disregarded book of 1911. The president of Universal Pictures read it through in a single night." (Forsyth. Phantom of Manhattan)

Production started in late 1924 and it did not smoothly. Set design of the backstage and cellars of the Paris Opera House proved so difficult for Universal, French artist Ben Caray had to be brought in having had worked in the French theater to replicate the floor plans. Chaney as well as the rest of the cast and crew found it difficult to work with director Rupert Julian. Tension hit a fever pitch when the director of photography, Charles Van Enger, became their go-between. Van Enger's reports back to Julian from Chaney would usually result in telling the director to go and "screw himself." "The Man of the Thousand Faces" would end up directing his own scenes. 

"The Man of the Thousand Faces" also had freedom to create his own makeup after the success of the makeup done in "The Hunchback of Notre Dame." (1923) His creation would have been the most accurate of all of the film and stage adaptations, with Chaney's eye sockets and nostrils painted black as well as wire pinning the tip of his nose up. A set of jagged false teeth were also applied. Chaney's cosmetics proved so effective when in theaters, moviegoers were known to have screamed or fainted when the Phantom's mask was pulled off in the now iconic scene. 

It would have taken three versions for the "Phantom" to become the emblematic horror film as we know it today. Maurice Pivar and Lois Weber ended up editing the initial 1924 film from the attempted romantic comedy made by Edward Sedgwick which was booed off the screen when previewed in April 1925. After shedding off most of the embarrassment, "The Phantom of the Opera" was officially released on September 6th, 1925 at the Astor Theater in New York City and in Hollywood the next month. A full organ was placed in the Astor just for the opening. The film was a success, grossing over $2 million at the box office. Mordaunt Hall of The New York Times  comes across as mixed dubbing the film as "an ultra fantastic melodrama, an ambitious production in which there is much to marvel at in the scenic efforts. It has been produced with a sort of mechanical precision" yet considers that "the narrative could have been fashioned in a more subtle manner and would then have been more interesting to the few." TIME also was underwhelmed, calling the film a "brave attempt" and "seems only pretty good."

"The Phantom of the Opera" will be on TCM October 3rd, 9 PM EST/8 PM CST

Links to Check Out

Universal to Demolish "Phantom of the Opera" Soundstage, But Preserve Silent Film's Set